Page 2291 - Shakespeare - Vol. 4

And in thy dead arms do I mean to place him,
Swearing I slew him, seeing thee embrace him.

«So thy surviving husband shall remain
The scornful mark of every open eye; [520]
Thy kinsmen hang their heads at this disdain,

Thy issue blurr’d with nameless bastardy.
And thou, the author of their obloquy,
Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes

And sung by children in succeeding times. [525]

«But if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend;

The fault unknown is as a thought unacted.
A little harm done to a great good end
For lawful policy remains enacted.

The poisonous simple sometime is compacted [530]
In a pure compound; being so applied,
His venom in effect is purified.

«Then for thy husband and thy children’s sake,
Tender my suit; bequeath not to their lot

The shame that from them no device can take, [535]
The blemish that will never be forgot,
Worse than a slavish wipe or birth-hour’s blot:
For marks descried in men’s nativity

Are nature’s faults, not their own infamy».

Here with a cockatrice’ dead-killing eye [540]
He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause;
While she, the picture of pure piety,
Like a white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws,

Pleads in a wilderness where are no laws,
To the rough beast that knows no gentle right, [545]
Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite.

But when a black-fac’d cloud the world doth threat,
In his dim mist th’ aspiring mountains hiding