For many so arrive at second masters,
Upon their first lord's neck.
PROMISING AND PERFORMANCE.
Promising is the very air o' the time: it opens the eyes of expectation: performance is ever the duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying* is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable: performance is a kind of will or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it.
Shall sit and pant in your great chairs of ease;
And pursy insolence shall break his wind,
With fear and horrid flight.
WILT thou draw near the nature of the gods?
Draw near them then in being merciful;
Sweet mercy is nobility's true badge.
Of noble minds, is honourable meed.
The birds chant melody on every bush;
The snake lies rolled in the cheerful sun;
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind,
And make a chequer'd shadow on the ground;
Under their sweet shade, Aaron, let us sit,
And whilst the babbling echo mocks the hounds,
* The doing of that we said we would do.
Replying shrilly to the well-tun'd horns,
As if a double hunt were heard at once,-
Let us sit down, and mark their yelling noise:
And, after conflict, such as was suppos'd
The wandering prince of Dido once enjoy'd,
When with a happy storm they were surpris'd,
And curtain'd with a counsel-keeping cave,—
We may, each wreathed in the other's arms,
Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber;
While hounds, and horns, and sweet melodious birds,
Be unto us, as is a nurse's song
Of lullaby, to bring her babe asleep.
DESCRIPTION OF A MELANCHOLY VALLEY.
A barren detested vale, you see, it is:
The trees, though summer, yet forlorn and lean,
O'ercome with moss, and baleful misletoe.
Here never shines the sun; here nothing breeds,
Unless the nightly owl, or fatal raven.
And, when they show'd me this abhorred pit,
They told me, here, at dead time of the night,
A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes,
Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins,*
Would make such fearful and confused cries,
As any mortal body, hearing it,
Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly.
DESCRIPTION OF A RING.
Upon his bloody finger he doth wear
A precious ring, that lightens all the hole,
Which, like a taper in some monument,
Doth shine upon the dead man's earthy cheeks,
And shows the ragged entrails of this pit.
Fair Philomela, she but lost her tongue,
And in a tedious sampler sew'd her mind:
But lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee:
A craftier Tereus hast thou met withal,
And he hath cut those pretty fingers off,
That could have better sew'd than Philomel.
O, had the monster seen those lily hands
* Hedge-hogs.
Tremble, like aspen leaves, upon a lute,
And make the silken strings delight to kiss them;
He would not then have touch'd them for his life:
Or had he heard the heavenly harmony,
Which that sweet tongue hath made,
He would have dropp'd his knife, and fell asleep,
As Cerberus, at the Thracian poet's* feet.
LAVINA'S LOSS OF HER TONGUE DESCRIBED.
O, that delightful engine of her thoughts, That blab'd them with such pleasing eloquence, Is torn from forth that pretty hollow cage: Where, like a sweet melodious bird, it sung Sweet varied notes, enchanting every ear!
For now I stand as one upon a rock.
Environ'd with a wilderness of sea;
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will, in his brinish bowels, swallow him.
When I did name her brothers, then fresh tears
Stood on her cheeks; as doth the honey dew
Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd.
CRUELTY TO INSECTS.
Mar. Alas, my lord, I have but kill'd a fly.
Tit. But how, if that fly had a father and mother How would he hang his slender gilded wings,
And buz lamenting doings in the air!
That with his pretty buzzing melody,
Came here to make us merry; and thou hast kill'd
Lo, by thy side where Rape, and Murder, stand Now give some 'surance that thou art Revenge, Stab them, or tear them on thy chariot wheels; And then I'll come, and be thy wagoner, And whirl along with thee about the globes. * Orpheus.
Provide the proper palfries, black as jet,
To hale thy vengeful wagon swift away,
And find out murderers in their guilty caves:
And, when thy car is loaden with their heads,
I will dismount, and by the wagon wheel
Trot, like a servile footman, all day long;
Even from Hyperion's rising in the east,
Until his very downfall in the sea.
LOVE IN A BRAVE YOUNG SOLDIER.
CALL here my varlet,* I'll unarm again:
Why should I war without the walls of Troy,
That find such cruel battle here within?
Each Trojan, that is master of his heart,
Let him to field; Troilus, alas! hath none.
The Greeks are strong and skilful to their strength, Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant; But I am weaker then a woman's tear,
Tamer than sheep, fondert than ignorance;
Less valiant than the virgin in the night,
And skill-less as unpractis'd infancy.
O Pandarus! I tell thee, Pandarus,
When I do tell thee, There my hopes lie drown'd,
Reply not in how many fathoms deep
They lie endrench'd. I tell thee, I am mad
In Cressida's love: Thou answer'st, she is fair;
Pour'st in the open ulcer of my heart
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice;
Handlest in thy discourse, O, that her hand,
In whose comparison all whites are ink,
Writing their own reproach; to whose soft seizure
The cygnet's down is harsh, and spirit of sense
Hard as the palm of ploughmen! This thou tell'st
As true thou tell'st me, when I say I love her;
But, saying thus, instead of oil and balm,
Thou lay'st in every gash that love hath given me
The knife that made it.
SUCCESS NOT EQUAL TO OUR HOPES.
The ample proposition, that hope makes
In all designs begun on earth below,
Fails in the promis'd largeness: checks and disasters
Grow in the veins of actions highest rear'd:
As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,
Infect the sound pine, and divert his grain
Tortive and errant* from his course of growth.
ADVERSITY THE TRIAL OF MAN.
Why then, you princes,
you with cheeks abashed behold our works; And think them shames, which are, indeed, nought
But the protractive trials of great Jove,
To find persistive constancy in men?
The fineness of which metal is not found
In fortune's love; for, the bold and coward,
The wise and fool, the artist and unread,
The hard and soft, seem all affin'd† and kin:
But, in the wind and tempest of her frown,
Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan,
Puffing at all, winnows the light away;
And what hath mass, or matter, by itself
Lies, rich in virtue, and unmingled.
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In meret oppugnancy: The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong (Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Twisted and rambling. + Joined by affinity.
+ Absolute.
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