Page 2784 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states [100]

Quite from their fixure! O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, [105]
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets [110]
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead; [115]
Force should be right, or, rather, right and wrong −

Between whose endless jar justice resides −
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite; [120]

And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,

This chaos, when degree is suffocate, [125]
Follows the choking;
And this neglection of degree it is
That by a pace goes backward in a purpose

It hath to climb. The general’s disdained
By him one step below, he by the next, [130]
That next by him beneath: so every step,
Exampled by the first pace that is sick

Of his superior, grows to an envious fever
Of pale and bloodless emulation,