After Paradise or Legends of Exile :: :: University of Virginia Library

You that have Feeling, think you to have all?
Poor fools, and you have absolutely nought!
In reckonings of this world's arithmetic
Everything else is something by itself,
Feeling alone is nothing. Could you add
That nothing to what counts for anything,
Forthwith a tenfold potency perchance
The unreckonable zero might bestow
Upon the reckon'd unit. But what boots
A value so vicarious?

Yours the spell
Whose all-transfigurating sorceries
Convert the dust man grovels in to gold;
Robing the pauper royal in the pomp
Of princely exultations, changing night
To morning, death to life, the wilderness
To paradise; beatifying pain,
Cleansing impurity, and strewing thick

212

The gulphs of Hell with starry gleams of Heaven.
But use it not! Unsanction'd miracles
Are sentenced sins. Writ large for all to read,
About the world's street corners Reason posts
“Beware of the Miraculous!” Whereto
Prudence appends, the placard to complete,
“Miracles are forbidden!” Use it not,
Your gift unblest! Lo, Virtue's High Priest comes,
Calls the Sanhedrim's long-phylacteried train,
Consults the scriptured scrolls, within them finds
No warrant for the wonders you perform,
And them and you doth anathematise.

Linger not! live not! give not! All your gifts
Shall turn to stones and scourges in the hands
That crave them, and to live is to be lost.