For riches make not worth
Although they can defile:
Nor can their want take worth away:
They are by nature vile.
No painter gives a form
That is not of his knowing;
No tower leans above a stream
That far away is flowing.
How vile and incomplete
Wealth is, let this declare
However great the heap may be
It brings no peace, but care.
And hence the upright mind,
To its own purpose true,
Stands firm although the flood of wealth
Sweep onward out of view
They will not have the vile
Turn noble, nor descent
From parent vile produce a race
For ever eminent.
Yet this, they say, can be,
Their reason halts behind,
Since time they suit to noble birth
By course of time defined.
It follows then from this
That all are high or base,
Or that in Time there never was
Beginning to our race.
But that I cannot hold,
Nor yet, if Christians, they;
Sound intellect reproves their words
As false, and turns away.
And now I seek to tell,
As it appears to me,
What is, whence comes, what signs attest
A true Nobility.
I say that from one root
Each Virtue firstly springs,
Virtue, I mean, that Happiness
To man, by action, brings.