That we our largest bounty may extend
Where nature doth with merit challenge.”
The treacherous Goneril and Regan, whose heartless natures their younger sister so well knew, made such fulsome protestations as shocked her into a dumb reliance on her own true affection; and when the yearning and testy monarch fondly asks what she can say, her whole being of love and sincerity is behind her words:
“Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty
According to my bond.”
Then broke forth the insane pride and self-will, which, brooking no appearance of opposition or evasion, were stricken with judicial blindness and left to prefer evil to good, to embrace the selfishness which was as false and cruel as hell, and to reject the love which was as gentle and true as heaven. With a terrible look, and a deep intensely girded voice, whose rapid accents made his whole chest shake with muffled reverberations, like a throbbing drum, he cried,—
“Let it be so: thy truth then be thy dower;
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate, and the night;