Cowards fight when they can fly no further
So doves do peck the falcon’s piercing talons.[194]
The TURTLE-DOVE, long the accepted symbol of conjugal affection and loving tenderness, has an honoured place in Shakespeare’s pages.[195] We there read of “a pair of loving turtle-doves that could not live asunder day or night.”[196] Florizel takes Perdita’s hand in Winter’s Tale, with the significant assertion:
So turtles pair
That never mean to part.[197]
And at the end of the same Play, the widowed Paulina, when all around her has at last ended happily, desires to retire into solitude:
I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither’d bough and there
My mate, that’s never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.