his heart burns in its affection
for others, and for compassion of himself he sheds tears from his eyes;
dying in the laughter of others, he is alive in his own lamentations;
and like him who no longer belongs to himself, he loves others and hates
himself; because matter, as say the physicists, with that measure with
which it loves the absent form, hates the present one. And so in the
octave finishes the war which the soul has within itself; and when he
says in the sistina, but if I be winged, others change to stone and that
which follows; he shows his passion for the warfare which he wages with
external contradictions. I remember having read in Jamblichus, where he
treats of the Egyptian mysteries, this sentence: "Impius animam
dissidentem habet: unde nec secum ipse convenire potest, neque cum
aliis."

TANS. Now listen to another sonnet, as sequel to what has been said:

10.

By what condition, nature, or fell chance,
In living death, dead life I live?
Love has me dead, alack! and such a death,
That death and life together I must lose.
Devoid of hope, I reach the gates of hell,
And laden with desire arrive at heaven:
Thus am I subject to eternal opposites,
And, banished both from heaven and from hell,
No pause nor rest my torments know,
Because between two running wheels I go,
Of which one here, the other there compels,
And like Ixion I pursue and flee;
For to the double discourse do I fit
The crosswise lesson of the spur and bit.

He shows how much he suffers from this dislocation and distraction in
himself; while the affections, leaving the mean and middle way of
temperance, tend towards the one and the other extreme, and so are
wafted on high or towards the right, and are also transported downwards
to the left.

CIC. How is it that, not being really of one or the other extreme, it
does not come to be in the conditions or terms of virtue?

TANS. It is then in a state of virtue when it keeps to the middle,
declining from one to the other opposite; but when it leads towards the
extremes, inclining to one or the other of those, it fails so entirely
from being virtue, that it is a double vice, which consists in this,
that the thing recedes from its nature, the perfection of which consists
in unity, and there where the opposites meet, its composition and virtue
exist. This, then, is how he is dead alive, or living dying; whence he
says, "In a living deat