Believe and be confirmed.
It was the winter wild, While the Heaven-born child, All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.
They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them of their blindness.
Have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea.
And that must end us, that must be our cure: To be no more. Sad cure! For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish, rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night Devoid of sense and motion?
Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.