ly aireth her conceit with the consideration
of experience. She travels far and is never weary, and gives over no
work but to better a beginning. She makes the king merciful and the
subject loyal, honour gracious and wisdom glorious. She pacifieth wrath
and puts off revenge, and in the humility of charity shows the nature of
grace. She is beloved of the highest and embraced of the wisest,
honoured with the worthiest and graced with the best. She makes
imprisonment liberty when the mind goeth through the world, and in
sickness finds health where death is the way to life. She is an enemy to
passion, and knows no purgatory; thinks fortune a fiction, and builds
only upon providence. She is the sick man's salve and the whole man's
preserver, the wise man's staff and the good man's guide. In sum, not to
wade too far in her worthiness, lest I be drowned in the depth of
wonder, I will thus end in her endless honour:--She is the grace of
Christ and the virtue of Christianity, the praise of goodness and the
preserver of the world.

LOVE.

Love is the life of Nature and the joy of reason in the spirit of grace;
where virtue drawing affection, the concord of sense makes an union
inseparable in the divine apprehension of the joy of election. It is a
ravishment of the soul in the delight of the spirit, which, being
carried above itself into inexplicable comfort, feels that heavenly
sickness that is better than the world's health, when the wisest of men
in the swounding delight of his sacred inspiration could thus utter the
sweetness of his passion, "My soul is sick of love." It is a healthful
sickness in the soul, a pleasing passion in the heart, a contentive
labour in the mind, and a peaceful trouble of the senses. It alters
natures in contrarieties, when difficulty is made easy; pain made a
pleasure; poverty, riches; and imprisonment, liberty; for the content of
conceit, which regards not to be an abject, in being subject but to an
object. It rejoiceth in truth, and knows no inconstancy: it is free from
jealousy, and feareth no fortune: it breaks the rule of arithmetic by
confounding of number, where the conjunction of thoughts makes one mind
in two bodies, where neither figure nor cipher can make division of
union. It sympathises with life, and participates with light, when the
eye of the mind sees the joy of the heart. It is a predominant power
which endures no equality, and yet communicates with reason in the rules
of conc