Red cheeks and fiery eyes blaze forth her wrong;
Being judge in love, she cannot right her cause ;

And now she weeps, and now she fain would speak,
And now her sobs do her intendments1 break.

Sometimes she shakes her head, and then his hand,
Now gazeth she on him, now on the ground;
Sometimes her arms enfold him like a band,
She would, he will not in her arms be bound ;
And when from thence he struggles to be gone,
She locks her lily fingers one in one.

"Fondling," she saith, "since I have hemmed thee here,

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

"Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain;
Then be my deer, since I am such a park ;
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.”

At this Adonis smiles as in disdain,

That in each cheek appears a pretty dimple:
Love made those hollows, if himself were slain,
He might be buried in a tomb so simple;

1 Intendments, intentions. So in Othello, Act IV. Sc. II.: "1 have said nothing but what I protest intendment of doing The word continued to be used long after the time of Shakspeare.

Foreknowing well if there he came to lie,
Why there Love lived and there he could not die.

These lovely caves, these round-enchanting pits,
Opened their mouths to swallow Venus' liking:
Being mad before, how doth she now for wits?
Struck dead at first, what needs a second striking?
Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn,
To love a cheek that smiles at thee in scorn!

Now which way shall she turn? what shall she say?

Her words are done, her woes the more increasing, The time is spent, her object will away,

And from her twining arms doth urge releasing:

Away he springs, and hasteth to his horse.

But lo, from forth a copse that neighbors by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young, and proud,
Adonis' trampling courser doth espy,

And forth she rushes, snorts, and neighs aloud:

The strong-necked steed, being tied unto a tree, Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.

Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,
And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;
The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,
Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven's thunder;
The iron bit he crushes 'tween his teeth,
Controlling what he was controlled with.

1 Remorse, tenderness.

His ears up pricked; his braided hanging mane
Upon his compassed' crest now stand on end;2
His nostrils drink the air, and forth again,
As from a furnace, vapors doth he send :

His eye, which scornfully glisters like fire,
Shows his hot courage and his high desire.

Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps,
With gentle majesty, and modest pride;
Anon he rears upright, curvets, and leaps,
As who should say, Lo!3 thus my strength is tried ;
And this I do to captivate the eye

Of the fair breeder that is standing by.

What recketh he his rider's angry stir,
His flattering "holla," or his "Stand, I say "?
What cares he now for curb, or pricking spur ?
For rich caparisons, or trapping gay?

He sees his love, and nothing else he sees,
Nor nothing else with his proud sight agrees.

1 Compassed, arched.

2 Mane is here used as a plural noun. In a note on Othello, Act 11. Sc. 1., Knight justifies the adoption of a new reading

"The wind-shaked serge, with high and monstrous mane

upon the belief that in this line we have a picture which was probably suggested in the noble passage of Job, "Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?" The passage before us shows that the image was familiar to the mind of Shakspeare, of the majesty of the war-horse erecting his mane under the influence of passion.

3 This is a faint echo of the wonderful passage in Job, saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha!"

"He

4 Holla. Ho is the ancient interjection, giving notice to stop. The word before us is certainly the same as the French hola, and is explained in Cotgrave's French Dictionary as meaning "enough, soft, soft, no more of that."

Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
So did this horse excel a common one,

In shape, in courage, color, pace, and bone.

Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing

strong,

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide :
Look what a horse should have, he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

Sometime he scuds far off, and there he stares;
Anon he starts at stirring of a feather;

To bid the wind a base1 he now prepares,

And whe'r he run, or fly, they knew not whether; For through his mane and tail the high wind

sings,

Fanning the hairs, who wave like feathered wings.

He looks upon his love and neighs unto her;
She answers him as if she knew his mind:
Being proud, as females are, to see him woo her,
She puts on outward strangeness, seems unkind;
Spurns at his love, and scorns the heat he feels,
Beating his kind embracements with her heels.

1 In the game of base, or prison base, one runs and challenges another to pursue. "To bid the wind a base" is therefore to challenge the wind to speed. We have the same expression in the early play of the Two Gentlemen of Verona:

Then, like a melancholy malecontent,
He vails' his tail, that, like a falling plume,
Cool shadow to his melting buttock lent;
He stamps, and bites the poor flies in his fume:
His love, perceiving how he is enraged,
Grew kinder, and his fury was assuaged.

His testy master goeth about to take him;
When lo, the unbacked breeder, full of fear,
Jealous of catching, swiftly doth forsake him,
With her the horse, and left Adonis there;

As they were mad unto the wood they hie them
Out-stripping crows that strive to over-fly them.

All swoln with chasing down Adonis sits,
Banning his boisterous and unruly beast;
And now the happy season once more fits,
That love-sick Love by pleading may be blest;
For lovers say the heart hath treble wrong,
When it is barred the aidance of the tongue.

An oven that is stopped, or river stayed,
Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage:
So of concealed sorrow may be said;
Free vent of words love's fire doth assuage;

But when the heart's attorney once is mute,
The client breaks, as desperate in his suit.

He sees her coming, and begins to glow,
Even as a dying coal revives with wind,

"Why should calamity be full of words?
Windy attorneys to their client woes."

The tongue, in the passage before us, is the attorney to the heart.