239

The shadow of my sorrow? Ha! let's see:-
'Tis very true, my grief lies all within;
And these external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief,
That swells with silence in the tortured soul;
There lies the substance.

240

17-iv. 1.

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds;
And he, the noble image of my youth,
Is overspread with them: Therefore my grief
Stretches itself beyond the hour of death;
The blood weeps from my heart.

For when his headstrong riot hath no curb,
When rage and hot blood are his counsellors,
When means and lavish manners meet together,
O, with what wings shall his affections' fly
Towards fronting peril and opposed decay!

241

19-iv. 4.

His grief grew puissant, and the strings of life
Began to crack.

242

34-v. 3.

The tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek.

243

11-i. 1.

Your loss is as yourself, great; and you bear it
As answering to the weight: 'Would I might never
O'ertake pursued success, but I do feel,

By the rebound of yours, a grief that shoots
My very heart at root.

244

I pray thee, cease thy counsel,

Which falls into mine ears as profitless
As water in a sieve: give not me counsel;
Nor let no comforter delight mine ear,

30-v.2.

But such a one, whose wrongs do suit with mine.

"His passion; his inordinate desires.

Bring me a father, that so loved his child,
Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine,
And bid him speak of patience;

Measure his woe the length and breadth of mine,
And let it answer every strain for strain;
As thus for thus, and such a grief for such,
In every lineament, branch, shape, and form:
If such a one will smile, and stroke his beard;
Cry-sorrow, wag! and hem, when he should groan;
Patch grief with proverbs; make misfortune drunk
With candle-wasters; bring him yet to me,
And I of him will gather patience.

But there is no such man.

245

Being not mad, but sensible of grief,

6-v. 1.

My reasonable part produces reason

How I may be deliver'd of these woes.

246

16-iii. 4.

Ah, my tender babes!

My unblown flowers, new-appearing sweets!
If yet your gentle souls fly in the air
Hover about me with your airy wings,
And hear your mother's lamentation.

247

Sorrow and grief of heart

Makes him speak fondly, like a frantic man.

248

I pray thee leave me to myself to-night;

For I have need of many orisons

24-iv. 4.

17-iii. 3.

To move the heavens to smile upon my state, Which, well thou know'st, is cross and full of sin. 35-iv. 3.

Candle-wasters is a contemptuous term for scholars, and is so used by Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, act iii. sc. 3. The sense then of the passage appears to be this;---If such a one will patch grief with pro verbs---case the wounds of grief with proverbial sayings; make misfortune drunk with candle-wasters--stupify misfortune, or render himself insensible to the strokes of it, by the conversation or lucubrations of scholars; the production of the lamp, but not fitted to human nature.

249

With the eyes of heavy mind,

I see thy glory, like a shooting star,
Fall to the base earth from the firmament!
Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west,
Witnessing storms to come, woe, and unrest.

250

17-ii. 4,

Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,
Making both it unable for itself,

And dispossessing all the other parts

Of necessary fitness?

So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons; Come all to help him, and so stop the air

By which he should revive: and even so

b

The general, subject to a well-wish'd king,

Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love Must needs appear offence.

251

Affliction is enamour'd of thy parts,

And thou art wedded to calamity.

252

Had it pleased Heaven

To try me with affliction; had he rain'd

5-ii. 4.

35-iii. 3.

All kinds of sores, and shames, on my bare head;
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips;

Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes;
I should have found in some part of my soul
A drop of patience: but (alas!) to make me
A fixed figure, for the time of scorn.
To point his slow unmoving finger at,—
O! O!

Yet could I bear that too; well, very well:
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart;
Where either I must live, or bear no life:
The fountain, from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!

b People.

Treasured up.

Or keep it as a cistern, for foul toads

To knot and gender in!-turn thy complexion there!
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubim,
Ay, there, look grim as hell!

253

Be witness to me, O thou blessed moon,
When men revolted shall upon record

Bear hateful memory, poor Enobarbus did
Before thy face repent!-

O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,

37-iv. 2.

The poisonous damp of night disponged upon me;
That life, a very rebel to my will,

May hang no longer on me.

254

30-iv. 9.

Bind up those tresses: O, what love I note
In the fair multitude of those her hairs!
Where but by chance a silver drop hath fallen,
Even to that drop ten thousand wiry friends
Do glew themselves in sociable grief;

Like true, inseparable, faithful loves,
Sticking together in calamity.

255

We are fellows still,

16-iii. 4.

Serving alike in sorrow: Leak'd is our bark;
And we, poor mates, stand on the dying deck,
Hearing the surges threat: we must all part
Into this sea of air.

27-iv. 2.

256

What is in thy mind,

That makes thee stare thus? Wherefore breaks that

sigh

From the inward of thee? One, but painted thus,
Would be interpreted a thing perplex'd

Beyond self-explication.

257

31-iii. 4.

Myself,

Who had the world as my confectionary,

d Discharge as a sponge when squeezed discharges the moisture it

had imbibed.

The mouths, the tongues, the eyes, and hearts, of men
At duty, more than I could frame employment;
That numberless upon me stuck, as leaves

Do on the oak, have with one winter's brush
Fell from their boughs, and left me open, bare
For every storm that blows.

258

I have felt so many quirks of joy, and grief,
That the first face of neither, on the start,
Can woman me unto 't.

27-iv. 3.

11-iii. 2.

259

Give me a gash, put me to present pain;

Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me,
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,

And drown me with their sweetness.

33-v. 1.

260

A joy past joy.

35-iii. 3.

261

There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture: they looked, as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: A notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say, if the importance were joy, or sorrow: but in the extremity of the one, it must needs be. 13-v. 2.

262

You have bereft me of all words,
Only my blood speaks to you in my veins:
And there is such confusion in my powers,
As, after some oration fairly spoke
By a beloved prince, there doth appear
Among the buzzing pleased multitude;

• This description not only contains the beautiful and the sublime, but rises to a still higher sublimity, or, to speak in the style of the Psalmist, to the most highest, in the allusion to sacred writ, relating to the two principal articles in the Old and New Testament, the fall of man, and his redemption. Shakspeare makes frequent references to the sacred text, and writes often, not only as a moralist, but as a divine. The thing imported.