His own, and tears of those that listened, fell
Oft as he sang that hand, lovely as light,
Forth stretched, and gathering from forbidden boughs
That fruit fatal to man. He sang the Flood,
Sin’s doom that quelled the impure, yet raised to height
Else inaccessible, the just. He sang
That patriarch facing at Divine command
The illimitable desert—harder proof,
Lifting his knife o’er him, the seed foretold:
He sang of Israel loosed, the twelve black seals