But smothered it within my panting bulk,
Which almost burst to belch it in the sea.
Gaoler. Awaked you not with this sore agony Clar. O, no, my dream was lengthened after life: O, then began the tempest to my soul, Who passed, methought, the melancholy flood, With that grim ferryman which poets write of, Unto the kingdom of perpetual night.
The first that there did greet my stranger soul,
Was my great father-in-law, renowned Warwick;
Who cried aloud, What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?'
And so he vanished: then came wandering by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood; and he squeaked out aloud,
Clarence is come; false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury;
Seize on him, Furies, take him to your torments!'
With that, methought, a legion of foul fiends
Environed me about, and howled in mine ears
Such hideous cries, that with the very noise
I trembling waked, and for a season after
Could not believe but that I was in hell,
Such terrible impression made the dream.*
* See the philosophic remarks of Lucretius:
'Mens sibi conscia factis,
Præmetuens adhibet stimulos, terretque flagellis,' &c.
THIS royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone, set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,"
Feared by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
* This exaggeration of the couleur-de-rose style may well be excused to a Plantagenet and to John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. But History tells a different story.
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
SIGNIOR ANTONIO, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys, and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me-misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well, then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
'Shylock, we would have moneys;' you say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold; moneys is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
'Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?' Or
Shall I bend low, and in a bondsman's key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness,
Say this,
'Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurned me such a day; another time
You called me-dog; and for these courtesies
I'll lend you thus much moneys?'
O Father Abram, what these Christians are,
Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect
The thoughts of others!
The Merchant of Venice, i. 3.
THE FORCE OF IMAGINATION.
LOVERS and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or, in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
A Midsummer Night's Dream, v. i.
LOVE that comes too late,
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,
To the great sender turns a sour offence,
Crying 'That's good that's gone.' Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends, and after weep their dust.
Our own love waking cries to see what's done,
While shame full late sleeps out the afternoon.
All's Well that Ends Well, v. 3.
(Perdita loq.)
My fairest friend,
I would I had some flowers o' the spring, that might
Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing. O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's waggon! daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
|