in vain things Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame, Or happiness in this or the other life. All who have their reward on earth, the fruits Of painful superstition and blind zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, empty as their deeds; All the unaccomplished works of Nature’s hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed, Dissolved on Earth, fleet hither, and in vain, Till final dissolution, wander here; Not in the neighbouring moon, as some have dreamed: Those argent fields more likely habitants, Translated saints, or middle Spirits, hold, Betwixt the angelical and human kind. Hither, of ill-joined sons and daughters born, First from the ancient world those giants came, With many a vain exploit, though then renowned; The builders next of Babel on the plain Of Sennaar, and still with vain design New Babels, had they wherewithal, would build; Others came single: he who, to be deemed A god, leaped fondly into Aetna flames, Empedocles; and he who, to enjoy Plato’s Elysium, leaped into the sea, Cleombrotus; and many more, too long, Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars, White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery. Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek In Golgotha him dead who lives in Heaven; And they who, to be sure of Paradise, Dying put on the weeds of Dominic, Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised. They pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed, And that crystalline sphere whose balance weighs The trepidation talked, and that first moved; And now Saint Peter at Heaven’s wicket seems To wait them with his keys, and now at foot Of Heaven’s ascent they lift their feet, when, lo! A violent cross wind from either coast Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry, Into the devious air. Then might ye see Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost And fluttered into rags; then relics, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, The sport of winds: all these, upwhirled aloft, Fly o’er the backside of the World far off Into a limbo large and broad, since called The Paradise of Fools; to few unknown Long after, now unpeopled and untrod.
All this dark globe the Fiend found as he passed; And long he wandered, till at last a gleam Of dawning light turned thitherward in haste His