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I SEND you here a sort of allegory, (For you will understand it) of a soul, A sinful soul possess’d of many gifts, A spacious garden full of flowering weeds, A glorious devil, large in heart and brain, That did love beauty only, (Beauty seen In all varieties of mould and mind) And knowledge for its beauty; or if good, Good only for its beauty, seeing not That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters That doat upon each other, friends to man, Living together under the same roof, And never can be sunder’d without tears. And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie Howling in outer darkness. Not for this Was common clay ta’en from the common earth Moulded by God, and temper’d with the tears Of angels to the perfect shape of man. |