All's Well That Ends Well

by William Shakespeare

DIANA.
Let death and honesty
Go with your impositions, I am yours
Upon your will to suffer.

HELENA.
Yet, I pray you;
But with the word the time will bring on summer,
When briers shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp. We must away;
Our waggon is prepar’d, and time revives us.
All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown.
Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.

[Exeunt.]

SCENE V. Rossillon. A room in the Countess’s palace.

Enter Clown, Countess and Lafew.

LAFEW.
No, no, no, your son was misled with a snipt-taffeta fellow there, whose villanous saffron would have made all the unbak’d and doughy youth of a nation in his colour. Your daughter-in-law had been alive at this hour, and your son here at home, more advanc’d by the king than by that red-tail’d humble-bee I speak of.

COUNTESS.
I would I had not known him; it was the death of the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever nature had praise for creating. If she had partaken of my flesh and cost me the dearest groans of a mother, I could not have owed her a more rooted love.

LAFEW.
’Twas a good lady, ’twas a good lady. We may pick a thousand salads ere we light on such another herb.

CLOWN.
Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or, rather, the herb of grace.

LAFEW.
They are not herbs, you knave; they are nose-herbs.