Page 2261 - Shakespeare - Vol. 4

Who overcome by doubt and bloodless fear,
With cold pale weakness numbs each feeling part.
Like soldiers when their captain once doth yield,
They basely fly, and dare not stay the field.

Thus stands she in a trembling ecstasy, [895]

Till cheering up her senses all dismay’d,
She tells them ’tis a causeless fantasy,
And childish error, that they are afraid;

Bids them leave quaking, bids them fear no more,
And with that word, she spied the hunter boar: [900]

Whose frothy mouth bepainted all with red,
Like milk and blood being mingled both together,
A second fear through all her sinews spread,

Which madly hurries her she knows not whither.
This way she runs, and now she will no further, [905]
And back retires, to rate the boar for murther.

A thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways,
She treads the path that she untreads again;

Her more than haste is mated with delays
Like the proceedings of a drunken brain, [910]
Full of respects, yet naught at all respecting,
In hand with all things, naught at all effecting.

Here kennell’d in a brake she finds a hound,

And asks the weary caitiff for his master;
And there another licking of his wound, [915]
’Gainst venom’d sores the only sovereign plaster.
And here she meets another sadly scowling,

To whom she speaks, and he replies with howling.

When he hath ceas’d his ill-resounding noise,
Another flap-mouth’d mourner, black and grim, [920]
Against the welkin volleys out his voice;
Another and another answer him,