To fill the mouth of deep defiance up, And shake the peace and safety of our throne. And what say you to this? Percy, Northumberland But wherefore do I tell these news to thee? SHAKSPEARE MOONLIGHT AND MUSIC. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Sit, Jessica Look, how the floor of heaven There's not the smallest orb, which thou beholdest, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. - Do thou but note a wild and wanton herd, If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound, Or any You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, By the sweet power of music. Therefore, the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods; The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Let no such man be trusted. SHAKSPEARE. LOVE'S ECSTASY. How all the other passions fleet to air, In measure rein thy joy, scant this excess; What find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit? What demi-god Should sunder such sweet friends: here in her hairs SHAKSPEARE OBERON'S VISION. My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, That the rude sea grew civil at her song; That very time I saw, (but thou couldst not,) And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow, In maiden meditation, fancy free; Yet marked 1 where the bolt of Cupid fell: It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,- Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once: Will make or man or woman madly doat SHAKSPEARE PROSPERO You do look, my son, in a moved sort, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and gr ves, And ye that on the sands, with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him SHAKSPEARE. MARIUS IN PRISON. THE peculiar sublimity of the Roman mind does not express itself, nor is it at all to be sought in their poetry. Poetry, according to the Roman ideal of it, was not an adequate organ for the grander movements of the national mind. Roman sublimity must be looked for in Roman acts, and in Roman sayings. Where, again, will you find a more adequate expression of the Roman majesty, than in the saying of Trajan:- Imperatorem oportere stantem mori - that Cæsar ought to die standing; a speech of imperatorial grandeur! Implying that he, who was (6 the foremost man of all this world," and, in regard to ali other nations, the representative of his own, should express its characteristic virtue in his farewell act-should die in procinctu― and should meet the last enemy as the first, with a Roman countenance and in a soldier's attitude. If this had an imperatorial - what follows had a consular majesty, and is almost the grandest story upon record. Marius, the man who rose to be seven times consul, was in a dungeon, and a slave was sent in with commission to put him to death. These were the persons, the two extremities of exalted and forlorn humanity, its vanward and its rearward man, a Roman consul and an abject slave. But their natural relations to each other were, by the caprice of fortune, monstrously inverted: the consul was in chains; the slave was for a moment the arbiter of his fate. By what spells, what magic, did Marius reinstate himself in his natural prerogatives? By what marvels drawn from heaven or from earth, did he, in the twinkling of an eye, again invest himself with the purple, and place between himself and his assassin a host of shadowy lictors ? By the mere blank supremacy of great minds over weak ones. He fascinated the slave, as a rattlesnake does a bird. Standing "like Teneriffe," he smote him with his eye, and said, "Tune homo, audes occidere C. Marium?" Dost thou, fellow, presume to kill Caius Marius? Whereat, the reptile, quaking under the voice, nor daring to affront the consular eye, sank gently to the ground turned round upon his hands and feet and, crawling out of the prison like any other vermin, left Marius standing in olitude as steadfast and immovable as the capitol. DE QUINCY. |