Here is the golden opportunity of the zealot. From its place of concealment beneath the tempting wares in his pack he takes a shabby little book and gives it to her saying:
Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price, may it proove as such to thee,
Nay—keep thy gold—I ask it not; for the Word of God is free!
Nor does the religious mind of Whittier fail to remember the gates of pearl, for in "Ego" he speaks of
The pearl gates of the Better Land.
Carlyle makes reference to the gem in a line greater in conception and more poetic than most of those which occur in the rhymes of the poets—"She died in beauty, like a pearl dropped from some diadem."
In Ruffini's "Dr. Antonio," man and woman are set in marriage as a foil and complement of each other though the metaphor shows some misunderstanding of the qualities of gems, for black diamonds are not as fiery as others. The lines are:
The fiery black diamond casting lustre over the Oriental pearl: the Oriental pearl in return lending softness to the black diamond.
Dryden does not forget pearls when he caparisons the royal mighty and in "Palamon and Arcite" fitly thus describes Emetrius, King of Inde:
His surcoat o'er his arms was cloth of Thrace,