CRESSIDA.
Wish’d, my lord! The gods grant—O my lord!
TROILUS.
What should they grant? What makes this pretty abruption? What too curious dreg espies my sweet lady in the fountain of our love?
CRESSIDA.
More dregs than water, if my fears have eyes.
TROILUS.
Fears make devils of cherubins; they never see truly.
CRESSIDA.
Blind fear, that seeing reason leads, finds safer footing than blind reason stumbling without fear. To fear the worst oft cures the worse.
TROILUS.
O, let my lady apprehend no fear! In all Cupid’s pageant there is presented no monster.
CRESSIDA.
Nor nothing monstrous neither?
TROILUS.
Nothing, but our undertakings when we vow to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers; thinking it harder for our mistress to devise imposition enough than for us to undergo any difficulty imposed. This is the monstruosity in love, lady, that the will is infinite, and the execution confin’d; that the desire is boundless, and the act a slave to limit.
CRESSIDA.
They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform; vowing more than the perfection of ten, and discharging less than the tenth part of one. They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?
TROILUS.
Are there such? Such are not we. Praise us as we are tasted, allow us as we prove; our head shall go bare till merit crown it. No perfection in reversion shall have a praise in present. We will not name desert before his birth; and, being born, his addition shall be humble. Few words to fair faith: Troilus shall be such to Cressid as what envy can say worst shall be a mock for his truth; and what truth can speak truest not truer than Troilus.