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MEDIÆVAL HYMNS.
89

    Their sunny tents, and houses luminous,
    All their eternal day in songs employing,
    Joying their end, without end of their joying,
    While their Almighty Prince destruction is destroying.

    No sorrow now hangs clouding on their brow,
    No bloodless malady impales their face,
    No age drops on their hair his silver snow,
    No nakedness their bodies doth embase,
    No poverty themselves and theirs disgrace;
    No fear of death the joy of life devours,
    No unchaste sleep their precious time deflowers,
    No loss, no grief, no change, wait on their winged hours.

    But now their naked bodies scorn the cold,
    And from their eyes joy looks, and laughs at pain:
    The infant wonders how he came so old,
    The old man how he came so young again:
    Where all are rich, and yet no gold they owe;
    And all are kings, and yet no subjects know;
    All full, and yet no time on food they do bestow.

    For things that pass are passed.

    Manifestly the Nam transire transiit of S. Peter:—as the wonder of the infant and the old man is simply a developement of the Non minuti, non deformes of Hildebert. But in the stanza that follows Fletcher has the advantage over Bernard, Hildebert, and Damiani by his sublime allusion to the Beatific Vision.

    In midst of this City Celestial,
    Where the Eternal Temple should have rose,
    Lightened the Idea Beatifical:
    End and beginning of each thing that grows,