The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, whilst some must sleep:
Thus runs the world away.”
The very briefest allusion to the subject of our Emblem is also contained in the Winter’s Tale (act i. sc. 2, l. 115, vol. iii. p. 323). Leontes is discoursing with his queen Hermione,—
“But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practised smiles,
As in a looking glass, and then to sigh, as ’twere
The mort o’ the deer; O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows!”
The poetical epithet “golden,” so frequently expressive of excellence and perfection, and applied even to qualities of the mind, is declared by Douce (vol. i. p. 84) to have been derived by Shakespeare either from Sidney’s Arcadia (bk. ii.), or from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (4to, fol. 8), where speaking of Cupid’s arrows, he says,—