119

JOR God's sake, let us sit upon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of

kings;

How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable; and, humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle wall-and farewell king!
(Shakespeare.)

ISABELLA.

H, I do fear thee, Claudio, and I quake,
Lest thou a feverous life should'st

entertain,

And six or seven winters more respect
Than a perpetual honour. Darest thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great,
As when a giant dies.

CLAUDIO.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where :
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit,

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be, worse than worst,

Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling; 'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

(Shakespeare.)

B

E absolute for death; either death or life

Shall thereby be the sweeter.

thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

Reason

That none but fools would keep a breath thou

art,

Servile to all the skyey influences,

That dost this habitation, where thou keepest,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;

For him thou labourest by thy flight to shun,

And yet runnest toward him still. Thou art not

noble ;

For all the accommodations that thou bearest

Are nursed by baseness.

valiant ;

Thou art by no means

For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provokest, yet grossly fear'st
Thou art not thy-
Thy death, which is no more.

self;

For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains That issue out of dust. Happy thou art not; For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get,

And what thou hast, forget'st. Thou art not cer

tain ;

For thy complexion shifts to strange effects

After the moon. If thou art rich, thou art poor,

For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bearest thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;
For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,
The mere effusion of thy proper loins,

Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,
For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth

nor age,

But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,

Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied eld; and, when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even.

(Shakespeare.)