Poems 21.777–24.1

you certainly saw, for the fact itself compelled you to confess, the sublime rights of the eternal Father and the mighty merit of Felix, when the water flowed abundantly in the heat, and by the godly loss by which you had given part to the martyr's halls, sudden courses grew, and, as the abundance of the spring was loosed at its mouth, the ordered streams, returned to you with much interest, flowed into your walls; and at the very time when so often you, the possessor of your water, used to be in want, God returning much more than he had taken from you, water flowed abundantly for your drinking and your baths. What gift, then, shall I return to you for so great a gift, Abella, poor in wealth? At least, while I proclaim your service and name, marking them in our song, I shall repay you this price in the honour of reward: that you may always be written as added to the praises of holy Felix and be remembered as the nursling of so great a patron, of whose gifts the greatest portion has been made for you. Now this labour of yours, to which the spirit of Felix drove you, that, with your whole people and council in harmony, you undertook a work to be achieved with great sweat, with the summer season doubling the hard labour, so that the channel of the ancient structure across unfavourable heights, known to past ages but now without use since the water failed, lying hidden among vast ridges under great piles of woods heaped up on every side, you strip of thick mounds, and restore its long-forgotten service, and gather the veins scattered through pathless places, which were sucked deep into the pumice sands, and compel each water again to follow its own tracks, and bring it back into the mouth of the mother channel, and make the long-empty channels, their course having ceased, overflow with returning flood, and now, Summus, you flood Nola with water, long complaining with its springs taken away, which enjoys Felix's waters, because this abundance is not the city's own now, which it has lately obtained by the zeal of Felix, enriched with abundant streams from divine help in return for the gift of a modest drop.

So you too, Nola, cherish little Abella with me as a mother, since, as you know, though she is your daughter, she is yet the mother of your waters, from whose native mountains all abundance will flow to you, in which you had been proud before among the fortunate, and of which afterwards, with better zeal, you were the minister. Rejoice, then, my Nola, and congratulate yourself, exulting with all your strength in Christ, who fashioned you through his friend and beloved Felix; and his lofty hand increased your beauty, with nature serving. Look at your face, in which you now shine out new, so that you may know whether you gave something to Felix's honour, or are rather cultivated, enriched by God through Felix. Where the rough pebble was dry in bare fields, now grace, changed, grows green in watered clods. Not only these fountains, Nola, has the rich grace of Christ poured out for you by the merit of Felix; it has also led heaven-flowing fountains here to your walls, and, placed in the rejoicing bosom of Felix, bade them flow out from your city into many cities with streams poured out. I speak of those servants of Christ, a pair illustrious to God, a pair noble in the name of Christ, lately risen within your borders with their mother Albina, pledges of all the saints and joys of heaven, Pinianus with Melania, a pair blessed in their covenant. God has made them both children of Felix and breasts, breasts of divine goodness flowing with milk, from which every poor man takes flowing nourishment, and every rich man likewise takes wholesome teaching. These, see, are fountains from the godly river of Christ, which do not stream through the earth in a visible flood, but abound in the living water of merciful kindness. Grant, Christ, that these fountains may well up for you with everlasting abundance in the breast of your Felix, and that these veins may never be thinned by any star. Flow always into hearts dedicated to you, Christ, and grant to your Felix, to whom you have entrusted us sinners, that your kindness may never withdraw the fountain of this help from our inmost being, and that Felix himself, an abundant fountain from your fountain, may flood us, so that your fountain, Christ the King, may always spring up in us, and that Felix may obtain that we, from wretched and needy, may by the lot of his name live happy.

Already I promise myself to store your songs in sacred books, and that you, inflamed by the divinity of Christ God, will loose your eloquent mouth to the highest Father. Only begin to give your breast to divine things and to lift your senses, raised up to God, from the earth. Soon a new light will rise for your eyes as heaven opens, and the sacred Spirit will enter by a silent passage through hidden ways and shake your inmost being with glad breath. Come, then, stretch the lyre, strike your fruitful breast, telling of great things; let the skill spent on your usual songs depart; a greater order of things is born for you. Not now do you sing the judgment of Paris or the false wars of the giants. That play of yours may have been for a boyish age once; trifles befitted the small boy. Now, graver in mind as you are more advanced in years, spurn the light Camenae with mature heart, and, as an age now fitted to chaste ways and the venerable appearance of your face require, take up the material, conceive divine thoughts. If you have won any glory from falsehoods and a great name from empty things, when you sang fictions in ancient songs or told earthly deeds, praising the insignia of triumphing kings, you were not worthy to take praise from those whom you rather adorned with the gift of rich speech. How much greater glory will come to you from these undertakings, in which, exercising your tongue, you will also train your mind to holiness and grasp praise and life together? And while, skilful, you read and write the true miracles of the highest God, you will learn to be nearer and dearer to God himself, whom, while believing you marvel at him, you will begin to love, and by loving God you will be loved in return by Christ.

Hitherto that trumpet of your voice has sounded for vain uses; now let it thunder more loftily the divine acts. You are stirred to know the causes of things and the beginnings of the world: lest, wandering, with your mind spread out into the void, you vainly seek innumerable worlds, the dreams of Epicurus, which, mad, he brings forth through the void from atoms as parents, the lawgiver Moses, venerable by his ancient name, telling of the world composed from its first origin by God's establishing, will release you from empty cares, and, telling of man formed from clay and breathed into with the sacred breath, he himself will teach you by whose gift you are higher than all that breathe on earth. Nor should you despise yourself as the stones of Pyrrha or the clay of Prometheus, you whom the highest hand deigned to fashion lofty in face and soul and in his own image. You will learn likewise, lest you go on handing over our free will to the fates, what sentence bound us to death and under whose law we drag out life. If you cast your mind higher than heaven and above the stars, and desire to know what is, or what was before time, John teaches what lies beyond both the world and the ages. “In the beginning,” he says, “was the Word”; God rejoiced in the Word as his pledge, and the Word was of God and at the same time the same Word was God. This is the Word without which nothing was made, through which all things were made and flourish, which rules all things, to which all things, subjected, obey, and all nature, laid low in eternal service to the begotten God, adores the name of the Begetter. And every tongue through the nations now confesses that Jesus is Lord, reigning in the Father's majesty, by whose name our salvation stands founded and our faith rests, reaching toward the ages of eternal life.

Supported by his divine gift, we mortals manage to overcome our fragile nature by chaste deeds and to break the chains of rigid death, and in the body not to follow bodily laws, following the divine footsteps of Christ God, with the mind governing soul and body under sacred arms, since the mind subjected to God takes up the arms of salvation and obtains a kingdom over its own soul and flesh; and each man becomes rightly master of himself, who, given to the one Lord for ever, is made ruler over his own limbs, unconquered by vices and a hater of wickedness, stronger than adversities by virtues, in just order a true man, because, mighty in mind, in which he has the light of reason, he tempers the servant senses with no struggle and bends his breast with calm reins. You, whose noble mind burns with the fire of heavenly seed, climb in spirit into the heavenly recesses and lay your head in the bosom of the Lord; soon, as you gape for it, Christ will generously give breasts flowing with sacred milk and will flood your mind with divine light, so that, the fog driven off, you may see the great laws of the dread God, by which Christ, the all-begetting Wisdom, abiding in himself, always renews all things. And as he wills, God, himself the judge of his works, holds and changes forms and lengthens or shortens the times of life, ruling heaven, sea, stars, winds by the power by which he made them (the great exodus from Egypt teaches it, and the tyrant drowned in the returning sea, who had himself before experienced heavy upheavals through all the elements), he whom all things fear, whom all things serve. For at one time a common land held the Jews, then the only nation chosen by God;

and yet that heavy anger of God against the proud enemies ran distinct among the mingled peoples. Now I know you do not say that uncertain chance drives the sea with storms, when you read that the sea, bidden to part, parted, and a dry way lay open between the waters with the waves stiffened, and again the loosened sea, at the command and rod of the holy prophet, returned into its liquid bays. In both the power of the sea obeyed, so that a way was given to the saints and vengeance. What of the prophet fleeing to Tarshish, whom, thrown into the sea by the lot of danger, a beast caught with its wide jaws and belched out unharmed from its vast belly? Does he not teach that sea and stars are moved by God's command? For, fleeing God in vain, whom, as he holds all things, no one escapes, he stirred the wrath of sky and sea together. For nature, knowing him a rebel against the almighty Lord, feared, as if aware, to carry the guilty man safely by itself, and bound the fugitive with winds and waves. This prophet was chosen by God to terrify sinful peoples with threatening warning; after he spoke of heavy destruction and broke the guilty and turned away the wrath of divinity, Nineveh washed its crimes with lavish weeping, and, well turned, escaped its last day. Did that king have a fate, who, with death near, prayed to the Lord, who he knew alone could bend his own laws, to stretch his spent age further, and earned to draw out three lustra, outliving his own years, and to live ages not his own? Shall we now admire Plato weaving three fates, or the numbers of Aratus, or the painted stars of Manetho?

Let them say, I ask, where they then placed the swift hours for those being born, and which stars went with which signs, when godly Hezekiah, praying by the power of faith, turned the courses of the stars and disturbed the passages of heaven by his commands, the light of the sun driven back? Or when the same sun, at the command of a holy leader, held back the day, night delayed, so that the victory of the sacred people might be completed: the balance of the sky stood still, the world's turning checked, so that the increased light might take in great triumphs. What of Christ, the offspring and power and wisdom of God, does he not sufficiently remove our cares from vain errors? And he teaches us both by warnings and by deeds that one God rules all things, so that we should think nothing to be without the mind of God the ruler, saying that not a leaf falls from the tree, nor a bird from the air, without his command? And when the Almighty calms the sea by his word or treads it with his foot, and drives away diseases by his word or presses demons, or sends souls back into dead bodies, and bids those long lifeless come out of opened tombs, and restores the rotten buried as life returns, does he not sufficiently show his own power as the author who alone governs all nature and life? To these, I pray, to these rather vow your study and labour of reading and writing; sing the great undertakings of the Thunderer, write the beginnings of things created by the Word, and the chaos before day and the twilight of the first light, and whatever, through all the elements in various ages since, you will learn was said or done by God through the holy volumes, which Moses taught, set on the tablets of the law, or which the new law of the gospel testament marks, revealing the mysteries of Christ, hidden before. Then I shall truly call you a divine poet, and shall drink your songs like a draught of sweet water, when they offer me nectar-draughts from the highest fountains, singing back Christ the Lord of things and testifying that your mind is strong with God, so that I may take from you at once riches of mouth and mind, and may congratulate the kinsman whom I rejoice to have joined to me by covenant, and near to me under holy religion, and, with bonds not to be dissolved with the mortal body, may embrace you as a holy brother with an everlasting pledge. Read happily, Jovius, in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Spring opens voices for the birds; my tongue has its spring in the birthday of Felix, by whose light winter itself flowers for rejoicing peoples; and though with black cold the season still draws out its wintry quarters amid frosts, the year congealed on whitening lands, yet on this day godly joys make a glad spring for us. Grief, the winter of the mind, yields, its cares driven from the breast; the clouds of sadness flee from the serene heart. As the gentle swallow recognizes friendly days, and the white bird with black wings, and that turtledove, kin of the godly dove, and the thickets resound with goldfinches only in new spring, and the birds which only lately wandered mute under bristling hedges soon rejoice everywhere as spring returns, as varied in their tongues as in their many-coloured wings: so I too recognize this day, which holy festivals renew every year with the just honour of great Felix. Now a calm spring is reborn for me as the year rejoices; now it delights to loose my mouth in measures and songs in vows, and to flower with new voices. God, flow into my heart, Christ, and fill me, thirsty, from heavenly fountains. But even a drop from you, sprinkled on my marrow, will be a river. For what wonder is it if with a little dew you fill the smallest soul, you who, made man in a small body, filled the world with eternal seed and saved the whole world with a drop of blood? Nod assent, fountain of the Word, God the Word, and make me now melodious with sweet voice like that bird of spring which, hiding under green foliage, rare in pathless places, is wont to soothe with many kinds of measures and through one tongue pour out more than one voice in changing song, a bird of one colour in plumage, but painted in its songs.

Now it rolls smooth measures, now draws out sharp whistles in long sounds, again begins as it were a tearful song, and suddenly cutting off its complaint with an end deceives astonished ears with the melody broken. But let your grace flow on me continually from you, Christ. And yet I pray that, like that bird, it may be granted me to vary my measures and to bring forth every year the promised songs with changed speech, though from one mouth, because rich grace always adds different material through the Lord's wondrous powers, which God, Christ, multiplies in dear Felix, producing famous miracles with saving signs. We see those which are wont to be seen every day, when he presses the viper's brood, the savage demons, and lashes the shouting enemies with a hidden hand; but this itself is noted as a wonder in this power: that although throughout the whole year he harasses the tormented demons and bids them leave the limbs of men, yet he prolongs many cases, so that a longer punishment may harass the evil enemies, or so that those who deserved to become vessels for evils, the healing delayed on account of their desert, may pay more fully for every crime over a prolonged time; or whether he is eager to indulge his birthday in this, to give help to few at other times, so that, kind, he may give more gifts on his birthday. For when this day draws near as the year slips away, then he presses more often and more heavily. You might see sick swarms then gathered more densely and sure health sought near the festival.

Then the demons, kindled more heavily than usual, burn and howl more mournfully and, subdued by greater force, groan now at their final torments, nor are they allowed to depart by an easy exit, but first, driven by wondrous and various painful punishments, they are lifted on high, suspended higher than usual, and are shaken in the void of the air and cling by hidden bonds in penal delay through the void; though it is through bodies not their own, their own punishment wears out the harassed enemies. The souls are released from punishments while they seem to bear punishments in the body, and, immune, they behold torments not their own in their own limbs; the man, with the demon captured, is free; there is only an appearance of punishments in the body; sensation is absent, because the cross is not the man's but the demon's. Bitter enemy, why do you insult us? With what hope do you rush at us? See, wicked one, by the art of our Redeemer in turn you, the mocker, are mocked; your trick turns into your own chains for you; capturing, you are captured, and binding, you are bound. The ensnared man becomes the snare, and the robber's own booty deceives him; and while the captive seeks the unlawful food of the captured body, he devours a deadly hook. I shall tell things greater still than these, yet seen: before others that man, whose sick limbs a long-established enemy besieges, snatched, shaken out from the crowd, to the godly threshold of the sacred martyr, and, brought up to the consecrated railings before the saint's doors, with body turned over, suspended with feet upturned, looking at the roof; and, what is more wondrous and sacred, his clothes do not fall back over his face, but, as if stiff or sewn to his feet, every sacred part of the body is veiled with a chaste covering, so that, evidently, the reverence of the divine work may remain with bodies covered, nor may the demon exult in the very punishment by which he is tormented by exposing shame with naked limbs; he is tortured more heavily with decency unharmed, while the coverings sit straight though the limbs are inverted.

These things are wonderful and great (who denies it?), and yet, better known by familiarity, they seem less wonderful to hear, however reverend to see and great in deed. So hear, I pray, the small and new deeds of my patron, which the Lord Christ does in him with many-sided power, by all of which he is eager to confirm one faith in us: that through open proofs we may see that the hidden God is present, and that the heavenly Lord, by the Word by which he founded all things, cares with fatherly zeal for the affairs and minds of men. Let my brother Theridius give me the first beginnings of the telling; for what work of Felix shall I take up to be sung sooner or first, than the one he did for me under my own roofs, of which he is also the master? The year falls on this day from that very night. You know that custom by which we are wont to fast before the day, and, the sacred rites offered late in the evening, each returns to his own home. Then, therefore, when the assemblies were dismissed from the Lord's temple, after rest was given to weary bodies by taking food, we began to exult in hymns to God and to prolong the night with psalms. Meanwhile this brother of mine, leaving the friendly choir to drive off, in the breeze breathing outside, the heat which the cell, smoky with waxed papyrus wicks, gave, where the portico stretches in a row of narrow roof, though the path lay hidden, blind with no light at night, yet here, with fearless step through familiar thresholds, alas, he was going, unwary of the danger now near. Close by, in the middle of the roof, between the ceiling and the ground, the rope that usually suspends a lamp was swinging, tying to its top thread a three-pronged iron, into which the handle of a glass lamp is inserted, and the eared cup is fixed by three hooks on every side.

At the bottom it is white with water, above the water yellow with oil. Liquid stands on liquid; the slippery moisture swims on the fountain below, and the mixture of fluids does not come together though joined. And it is wondrous that the fat floats; nor does the dense matter break through the loose element, but the light supports the thick, so that the water, thinner than the solid flow, staying beneath the oil, is the foundation for liquids. And so great a discord shines within among the mixed juices that you may see the liquids mixed yet apart, and in the common bosom of the cup, with clear distinction, the nature of each liquid keeps its colour. A three-footed lead is sunk in the middle, and its hollow tip stands out, packed with the kindling of oiled flax. The wet tow catches liquid fire in a slender flame, and the slender wick flashes in the glass shallows, surrounded by the space of the standing oil, and quivering from its trembling tip a sharp light softly casts shadowy light into the inner rooms and opens the dense darkness with calm splendour. This, however, had been removed when the night was already far spent, since, the hours being prolonged by the wakeful boys, the thirsty light had failed with its oil consumed. But the boy who had taken away the lamp when the light went out, and had loosened the rope in taking it down, neglected to draw it up and tie it back with the usual knot. Hence the line, looser, swung low, without the welcome light and full of blind danger. For the top of the noose was armed with toothed, threatening hooks, and these then met my brother badly, almost badly, or rather well by Christ's nod, who turned well into memorable joys an event deadly for us.

So (see the hand of Christ) that rope, wrongly hanging through the darkness lower than usual, hung below its accustomed space in the air; and thence, made level with the region of his head, as his height was, alas, with its triple point it caught the face of the unsuspecting man as he came and put a hook into his eye as it met him, and the point, slipping through to the inmost, leaped under the tender eyelid, where the cautious hand of the healing art can scarcely guide a light probe with trembling control and draw it under the eyelid with a light touch. Struck suddenly by the blow of so hard a stroke, he cries out and, disturbed, brings his trembling hands to the eye itself; and he holds the iron shut in together with the eye, to restrain it, or, if it should fall, to catch the slipping little ball, which, keeping the inmost parts of sight, lies white within a round bag with liquid poured between, under the glassy image of the black pupil. This, like a root, supports the eye with marrow beneath and feeds it with the moist fuel of the veins, while the fountains of the eyes stand firm in an equal star. But if, by heavy disease or blow, alas, the membrane of the flowing little eye is torn and bursts, that ball leaps out and, left by the nourishing juice, deserts the drying hollow emptied of light. Meanwhile the boy, roused by the cry of the sufferer, runs up, leaving his bed as sleep flees, and holds a lit lamp with his hand to his face.

He had covered his face with his hands and, with his forehead turned upward, like one transfixed, was looking up, to keep the rope unmoving, his body balanced, governing his trembling limbs by the requirements of the wound, while he feared to tear the wound open by a contrary movement, and with the one eye that was still free he guarded the captured eye from danger by its companion's help, and yet did not dare to touch the iron to draw it out, lest by drawing the point he should draw out the clinging ball as well, nor could he any longer bear the delay of the weapon fixed beneath his sight. But, as he despaired of healing from mortal help, soon Felix, implored, is present with divine help; hanging in so great a wound, he calls on him and brings out his complaint in such words: “Woe is me! How great are the sins that press my labours, who have deserved, wretch, to receive so great a blow with Felix as patron, and near Felix too, and moreover on his very birthday? Alas, guilty of great crime, whom punishment strikes at the time when he is wont to release. Holy one, I pray, help your own; I know you stand nearest, and from the adjoining building, with your ears turned here, you have heard, Felix, the weeping of your unhappy nursling; or if you cling now, joined to the lofty side, before the throne of the great King as a friendly confessor, you receive this voice of your poor man, revered one, across the clouds with the ear of God, and do not scorn it, but there you ask for the health that you may bring me, Christ pitying. So come, Felix, everlasting patron of my soul, now run to me as physician in bodily danger. Run, I pray, and set your holy hands against the fall threatening my eye, and pull out the fixed iron you see, which I do not dare to draw out with my own hand, lest I rob myself of sight while I try to free myself from the weapon.

For so I feel the bolt driven deep into me, the nail inserted under the covered inner parts of the eye. Only you, divine hand, which made the very eyes in us, the right hand which made you too mighty with healing power, by which you tame the black demons by tormenting them, by which you can drive out every torment of the perishing body by the lofty name of Christ, mighty through the almighty Lord: with him as protector, now take me up to be healed. And let not my sins conquer you, but rather let them fall, conquered by you. For I am worthier of this wound, I confess, than of the gift of gentle Christ. But remember the word and deed of the Lord himself, who by his coming redeemed the life of the sinner. If you wish to judge with me by the right of justice, I am worthy to be punished not in one eye only but in both, so that I might be such in face as I am also within, in my dark heart, by which I make ill use of my bodily sight, blind to just things, sharp-eyed for wicked ones, and I confess that the sinner ought to be one-eyed, if it is fitting that such a man be yours. Bound by whatever crime, he becomes worthy of pardon if he now begins to be yours, as I long ago began to be part of your own, to whom I came, not following love of my native land, but with the desire by which I had dedicated myself to you, holy one, despising the dangers of sea and land; and, by the example of the good, I broke the bonds of my kindred land to serve you, together with those companions among whom I boast myself yours; show it in this help, that I may not lose my sight, pierced with so great a wound.

Grant, I pray, so noble a gift to your unworthy servant for the praise of the Lord; grant this distinction to your day, holy one, so that, as the glory of Christ, whom you confessed, made this day your birthday of eternal light for ages, I may have it as the birthday of my eye, and may likewise celebrate Felix and the light received for me from Felix.” While the simple man weeps such things, behold, the prospering hand of blessed Felix is soon present, and, silently breathing on the wavering mind of the frightened man, strengthens mind and hand, so that he does not fear to draw out the iron, about to dare in safety. Scarcely had he tried this, and the hook, as if slippery, falls out of the eye without the eye; only a stream followed and spewed out with tears the heat that had festered. Soon the eye, cleansed from the night of so great a danger, shone with as pure a mirror as it is seen now too, sound, shining by the gift of eternal Christ. And I think it shines more today than usual, because the very day that restored the light adds light too. So, faithful ones, behold now in your minds the image of so great a danger, and likewise weigh the working of so great a gift. A man already grave with mature age and tall in body had stuck on the little hook of the line like a fish on a hook; and he hung in the place of the lamp, with his eye open, but not willingly, for the nail, hooking under the eyelid it was fixed in, drew it apart; nor did it make a wound, the divine hand forbidding, which had made there both the point of the iron harmless and its weight light; where heavy mucus or a hair is intolerable, and where we cannot bear the speck of the smallest grain of sand, who would believe that there the heavy iron with curved point, smeared moreover with dirt clotted from the lamp, fixed there, pressed long on the delicate pupil with its metal with impunity, and the sight was violated by no wound?

What hand so fine in its fingers or in the art of healing could insert itself into so slight a gap between joined parts, and, penetrating between the eyelid and the eye, pushed under along both ways by a fragile passage, suspend the iron with the eye unharmed, iron which filled the whole orb of the eye with the thickness of its solid covering, fixing it with its point yet not hurting it with a wound? What hand could do this but the hand that made all things? That Spirit of God, penetrating everywhere through all natures of things, finer than everything fine, who restored lost light to the blinded and who made one blind from the womb to have new light, filling out the face of an imperfect body's nature with the Creator's art, by which he perfects the whole world, that Son of God, the hand and wisdom of the Father, the all-producing fountain and stability of things, Christ. He himself once fashioned that man in his mother's womb not complete, so that afterward, made man and himself creator, he might add this wondrous work too to his divine signs, filling the empty orbs with sight. In short, spitting on the ground he makes clay, from which he gives back to his believing nursling the sight denied him at birth, and with the same material with which he had fashioned the whole body he completes the half-finished man in the defective part, to prove that he himself had come in our flesh, he who, with God the Father, by the word of a common image, had formed Adam, composed of clay and breath. He himself, the maker, our light, God, willed to adorn the birthday of his friend Felix with so great a healing, to show the lofty merit of the confessor by a mighty gift, not to heap up the honour of the martyr by this work, on whom he had long ago conferred great palms with noble titles and blessed name, which the kindness of Christ the Lord continues in him at all times with untiring powers.

But God willed to give us a special joy at this time, and, working some such sign of our own patron for his own servants, to show us as the very nurslings of starry Felix, and to teach us to live by his merit and care, by which, guarding our salvation as watchman, he often keeps the hostile enemy with his night attacks away from our limbs and minds alike. In short, we now rejoice in the honour of our danger, and, seeing shining with equal sight him whom we had seen almost disfigured with one eye lost, we rejoice, touched in our marrow, that this brother is safe, whom Christ has given us with so great a gift. Rightly I value him equal to my eyes, in whose light the hand of Felix shines in Christ, my glory. O happy fall, good wounds, sweet danger, through which I learned that I am the care of the martyr! For it was worth so much to me almost to have lost light, that I now have light by Felix's gift.

Martinianus, brother to me in spirit and kinsman by one faith, whom you, escorting him with eloquent letters, had sent to come to us, now barely in possession of his own safety, empty of the writings he lost, but full, as the herald of your love, we have received as your very mouth, and a letter truer than letters, sealed from your heart, since he brought you back to us in a spiritual letter, we have read with mind and ear. Now, both bound to each other, we give right hands in the kiss of sacred peace, and we offer to God the sacrifice of praise and return thanks to Christ, by whose deliverance our guest entered our thresholds safe out of the sea; for he suffered dire things, and yet experienced miracles in his dangers. Setting out from his homeland, for a reason known to you, he had chosen the journey on foot, but, reckoning with himself the long stretches of land, he changed his mind about the road, and preferred the idle nausea of tossing on the waves to the labour of the feet. He set sail from Narbo along the savage road of the sea, trusting a fragile hull. Hence this man, lazy in walking, in turn became repentant of sailing.