Page 1968 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

By giving love, your sorrow and my grief
Were both extermined.

PHEBE
Thou hast my love. Is not that neighbourly? [90]

SILVIUS
I would have you.

PHEBE
Why that were covetousness.
Silvius, the time was that I hated thee;

And yet it is not that I bear thee love,
But since that thou canst talk of love so well,
Thy company, which erst was irksome to me, [95]

I will endure; and I’ll employ thee too.
But do not look for further recompense
Than thine own gladness that thou art employ’d.

SILVIUS
So holy and so perfect is my love,
And I in such a poverty of grace, [100]

That I shall think it a most plenteous crop
To glean the broken ears after the man
That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then
A scatter’d smile, and that I’ll live upon.

PHEBE

Know’st thou the youth that spoke to me erewhile? [105]

SILVIUS

Not very well, but I have met him oft,
And he hath bought the cottage and the bounds
That the old carlot once was master of.

PHEBE
Think not I love him, though I ask for him.