The Fourth Treatise

Soft rhymes of love I used to find
Within my thought, I now must leave,
Not without hope to turn to them again;
But signs of a disdainful mind
That in my Lady I perceive
Have closed the way to my accustomed strain.

And since time suits me now to wait,
I put away the softer style
Proper to love; rhyme subtle and severe
Shall tell how Nobleman's estate
Is won by worth, hold false and vile
The judgment that from wealth derives a Peer.

First calling on that Lord
Who dwells within her eyes,
Containing whom, my Lady learnt
Herself to love and prize.

One raised to Empire held,
As far as he could see,
Descent of wealth, and generous ways,
To make Nobility.

Another, lightly wise,
That saying turned aside,
Perchance for want of generous ways
The second source denied.

And followers of him
Are all the men who rate
Those noble in whose families
The wealth has long been great.

And so long among us
The falsehood has had sway,
That men call him a Nobleman,
Though worthless, who can say.

I nephew am, or son,
Of one worth such a sum;
But he who sees the Truth may know
How vile he has become

To whom the Truth was shown,
Who from the Truth has fled,
And though he walks upon the earth
Is counted with the dead:

Whoever shall define
The man a living tree
Will speak untruth and less than truth,
Though more he may not see.

The Emperor so erred;
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