“If tears could wash the ill away,
A pearl for each wet bead I’d pay.”
In Chalkhill’s “Thealma and Clearchus,” we find of the former:
“Anon she drops a tear,
That stole along her cheeks, and falling down,
Into a pearl it freezeth with her frown.”
Robert Southwell, in “St. Mary Magdalen’s Tears,” says: “The angels
must bathe themselves in the pure stream of thine eyes, and thy face
shall be set with this pearly liquid, that, as out of thy tears were
stroken the first sparks of thy Lord’s love, so thy tears may be the
oil to feed his flames.”