Page 2781 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

Exit.

Scene III IT

Sennet. Enter Agamemnon, Nestor, Ulysses, Diomedes, Menelaus, with

other Greek leaders.

AGAMEMNON

Princes,
What grief hath set the jaundice on your cheeks?
The ample proposition that hope makes
In all designs begun on earth below

Fails in the promised largeness: checks and disasters [5]
Grow in the veins of actions highest reared,
As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,
Infect the sound pine, and divert his grain

Tortive and errant from his course of growth.
Nor, princes, is it matter new to us [10]
That we come short of our suppose so far
That, after seven years’ siege, yet Troy walls stand;

Sith every action that hath gone before
Whereof we have record, trial did draw
Bias and thwart, not answering the aim [15]
And that unbodied figure of the thought

That gave’t surmisèd shape. Why then, you princes,
Do you with cheeks abashed behold our works,
And think them shame, which are, indeed, naught else
But the protractive trials of great Jove [20]

To find persistive constancy in men? −
The fineness of which metal is not found
In fortune’s love: for then the bold and coward,
The wise and fool, the artist and unread,

The hard and soft, seem all affined and kin; [25]
But in the wind and tempest of her frown,
Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan,
Puffing at all, winnows the light away,

And what hath mass or matter by itself