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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
The archbishop's grace of York, Douglas, Mortimer,
Capitulate against us, and are up.

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But wherefore do I tell these news to thee?
Why, Harry, do I tell thee of my foes,
Which art my nearest and dearest enemy?
Thou that art like enough, — through vassal fear,
Base inclination, and the start of spleen,
To fight against me under Percy's pay,
To dog his heels, and courtesy at his frowns,
To show how much degenerate thou art.

SHAKSPEARE

MOONLIGHT AND MUSIC.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night,
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

Sit, Jessica Look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;

There's not the smallest orb, which thou beholdest,
But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins:
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. -
Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn;
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,
And draw her home with music.

Do thou but note a wild and wanton herd,
Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,
Fetching mad bounds, bellowing, and neighing loud,
Which is the hot condition of their blood;

If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,
air of music touch their ears,

Or any

You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,
Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze,

By the sweet power of music. Therefore, the poet

Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;
Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change his nature.

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus:

Let no such man be trusted.

SHAKSPEARE.

LOVE'S ECSTASY.

How all the other passions fleet to air,
As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,
And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy.
O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy,

In measure rein thy joy, scant this excess;
I feel too much thy blessing, make it less,
For fear I surfeit!

What find I here?

Fair Portia's counterfeit? What demi-god
Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes?
Or whether, riding on the balls of mine,
Seem they in motion? Here are severed lips,
Parted with sugar breath; so sweet a bar

Should sunder such sweet friends: here in her hairs
The painter plays the spider, and hath woven
A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men,
Faster than gnats in cobwebs. But her eyes,
How could he see to do them? having made one,
Methinks, it should have power to steal both his
And leave itself unfurnished. Yet look, how far
The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow,
In underprizing it, so far this shadow
Doth limp behind the substance.

SHAKSPEARE

OBERON'S VISION.

My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,

That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid's music.

That very time I saw, (but thou couldst not,)
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed: a certain aim he took
At a fair vestal, throned by the west;

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon:
And the imperial votress passéd on

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,-
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.

Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid,

Will make or man or woman madly doat
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again,
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

SHAKSPEARE

PROSPERO

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed; be cheerful, sir;
Our revels now are ended; these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

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
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid
(Weak masters though you be,) I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong based promontory
Have I made shake; and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves, at my command,
Have waked their sleepers-oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure and when I have required
Some heavenly music, (which even now I do,)
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.

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.

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DE QUINCY.

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