First set the false in view,
Proceeding, on the other side,
To what was less than true.

For riches make not worth
Although they can defile:
Nor can their want take worth away:
They are by nature vile.

No painter gives a form
That is not of his knowing;
No tower leans above a stream
That far away is flowing.

How vile and incomplete
Wealth is, let this declare
However great the heap may be
It brings no peace, but care.

And hence the upright mind,
To its own purpose true,
Stands firm although the flood of wealth
Sweep onward out of view

They will not have the vile
Turn noble, nor descent
From parent vile produce a race
For ever eminent.

Yet this, they say, can be,
Their reason halts behind,
Since time they suit to noble birth
By course of time defined.

It follows then from this
That all are high or base,
Or that in Time there never was
Beginning to our race.

But that I cannot hold,
Nor yet, if Christians, they;
Sound intellect reproves their words
As false, and turns away.

And now I seek to tell,
As it appears to me,
What is, whence comes, what signs attest
A true Nobility.

I say that from one root
Each Virtue firstly springs,
Virtue, I mean, that Happiness
To man, by action, brings.

This, as the Ethics teach,
Is habit of right choice
That holds the means between extremes,
So spake that noble voice.

Nobility by right
No other sense has had
Than to import its subject's good,
As vileness makes him bad.

Such virtue shows its good
To others' intellect,
For when two things agree in one,
Producing one effect.

One must from other come,
Or each one from a third,
If each be as each, and more, then one
From the other is inferred.

Where Virtue is, there is
A Nobleman, although
Not where there is a Nobleman
Must Virtue be also.

So likewise that is Heaven
Wherein a star is hung,
But Heaven may be starl