Tib. And myself good—his life’s most only end.
Herc. Which, O! may never end!
Tib. Yes, Fawn, in time. We must not prescribe to nature everything. There’s some end in everything. 490
Herc. But in a woman. Yet, as she is a wife, she is oftentimes the end of her husband.
Tib. Shall I, I say——
Herc. Shall you, I say, confound your own fair hopes,
Cross all your course of life, make your self vain
To your once steady graveness, and all to second
The ambitious quickness of a monstrous love,
That’s only out of difficulty born,
And followed only for the miracle
In the obtaining? I would ha’ ye now 500
Tell her father all.
Tib. Uncompassionate vild man!
Shall I not pity if I cannot love?
Or rather, shall I not for pity love
So wondrous wit in so most wondrous beauty,
That with such rarest art and cunning means
Entreats[220] what I (thing valueless) am not
Worthy to grant, my admiration?
Are fathers to be thought on in our loves?
Herc. True, right, sir;
Fathers or friends, a crown and love hath none, 510
But are allied to themselves alone.
Your father, I may boldly say, he’s an ass
To hope that you’ll forbear to swallow
What he cannot chew; nay, ’tis injustice, truly,
For him to judge it fit that you should starve
For that which only he can feast his eye withal,
And not disgest.[221]
Tib. O! Fawn, what man of so cold earth
But must love such a wit in such a body!
Thou last and only rareness of Heaven’s works,
From best of man made model of the gods! 520
Divinest woman, thou perfection
Of all proportion’s beauty, made when Jove was blithe—
Well filled with nectar, and full friends with man—
Thou dear as air, necessary as sleep
To careful man! Woman! O who can sin so deeply
As to be curs’d from knowing of the pleasures
Thy soft society, modest amorousness,
Yields to our tedious life!
Fawn, the duke shall not know this.
Herc. Unless you tell him. But what hope can live in you, 530
When your short stay and your most shorten’d conference,
Not only actions, but even looks observ’d,
Cut off all possibilities of obtaining?