LORENZO How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: Soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins, Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
[Swift shadow sweeps over them in darkness. Waning from its visionary theme to a hint of the “muddy vesture of decay,” the music flows onward then into a dance melody; moonlight touches the garden again [on the left] with its liquid glow, wherein—whirled into light from a group of shadowy dancers outside—Florizel and Perdita are disclosed.]
FLORIZEL [As Perdita withdraws shyly her hand from his, speaks to her ardently.] What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’d have you do it ever ... When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function: each your doing So singular in each particular, Crowns what you are doing in the present deed, That all your acts are queens....
PERDITA O Doricles, Your praises are too large: but that your youth, And the true blood which peepeth fairly through ’t, Do plainly give you an unstained shepherd, With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, You woo’d me the false way.
FLORIZEL I think you have As little skill to fear as I have purpose To put you to ’t. But come; our dance, I pray: Your hand, my Perdita!
PERDITA [Giving her hand confidingly.] My Florizel!
[Together they dance away into the dark and the luring music, as
[Still, after the curtains’ closing, the music continues, but now more faint, changing the idyllic strains of the dance rhythm to a minor sadness, which gradually takes form as a drear, monotonous processional. Through the faint music, Miranda speaks to Ariel.]
MIRANDA Too brief! too brief, sweet bird! O Ariel, be Time’s nightingale, and charm these lovers back To yearn immortal youth. Methinks already Their absence leaves us age’d: Dost thou not feel A waning of high powers? Doth not a pallor Creep on the glowing world?