Page 31 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

“Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the Sphery chime...”
(1018-1023)
Virtue is calm thinking, self-radiant (365-80) needing neither sunlight nor moonlight, only solitude and contemplation. Virtue is refuge: she who possesses it has a light within her own breast, ‘clad in complete steel’ (421). Virtue is courage: Chastity’s hidden strength survives every ordeal: it crosses perilous forests, desolate heaths, and infamous hills. Virtue is untouchable: no savage, Bandit or mountaineer, or evil thing, hag or ghost, can harm her (420-35), and though it may be assailed, it is never hurt (589-90).
Philosophy divine, never harsh, “but musical as Apollo’s lute,/And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets,/Where no crude surfeit reigns,” (475-80) whose swift wings towards the sublunar spheres flee, shall always seek a shepherd’s healing herb to overcome the glass of deformation and grief. It shall always seek its very nature to be redeemed: only Sabrina’s purity can deliver Lady Chastity from the confinements and angst of Comus’ freezing chair. Only holy water can break the spell and destroy glutinous heat. Philosophy as divine as Lady Chastity 3⁄4 eternal companion of grief and sorrow, redeemer, too, of tragic humankind. She is the Lady of Virtue of Herakles, of Apollodorus, of Dante and of Boethius last hours. Lady whose presence in every capacious being is felt, in the said and the
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