Be tongues, which still thus cry unto your ear,
(Could ye amidst world’s cataracts them hear,)
From fading things, fond wights, lift your desire,
And in our beauty, his, us made, admire:
If we seem fair, O think how fair is he
Of whose fair fairness shadows, steps, we be.
No shadow can compare it with the face,
No step with that dear foot which did it trace.”
(ll. 197–234.)
This “Song,” then, though drawing on a different phase of Platonism—its more philosophic and fanciful side,[[6]] not its deep ethical truth—follows the same order of thought as Spenser’s “Hymne,” and like that presents heavenly love as a love known in the soul and growing out of a correct notion of the relative values of the visible beauty of the senses and the invisible beauty of mind.