Quin tibi sim juvenis, tuque puella mihi.
Dear wife, let's live in love, and die together,
As hitherto we have in all good will:
Let no day change or alter our affections.
But let's be young to one another still.
[4728]Et me ab amore tuo deducet nulla senectus,
Sive ego Tythonus, sive ego Nestor ero.
No age shall part my love from thee, sweet wife,
Though I live Nestor or Tithonus' life.
'Tis a happy state this indeed, when the fountain is blessed (saith Solomon, Prov. v. 17.) “and he rejoiceth with the wife of his youth, and she is to him as the loving hind and pleasant roe, and he delights in her continually.” But this love of ours is immoderate, inordinate, and not to be comprehended in any bounds. It will not contain itself within the union of marriage, or apply to one object, but is a wandering, extravagant, a domineering, a boundless, an irrefragable, a destructive passion: sometimes this burning lust rageth after marriage, and then it is properly called jealousy; sometimes before, and then it is called heroical melancholy; it extends sometimes to co-rivals, &c., begets rapes, incests, murders: Marcus Antonius compressit Faustinam sororem, Caracalla Juliam Novercam, Nero Matrem, Caligula sorores, Cyneras Myrrham filiam, &c. But it is confined within no terms of blood, years, sex, or whatsoever else. Some furiously rage before they come to discretion, or age. [4730]Quartilla in Petronius never remembered she was a maid; and the wife of Bath, in Chaucer, cracks,