- Excerpts
- by William Shakespeare
- But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,
- Lives not alone immured in the brain;
- But, with the motion of all elements,
- Courses as swift as thought in every power,
- And gives to every power a double power,
- Above their functions and their offices.
- It adds a precious seeing to the eye;
- A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
- A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound,
- When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d:
- Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
- Than are the tender horns of cockl’d snails;
- Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste:
- For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
- Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
- Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
- As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair:
- And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
- Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
- *
- Never durst poet touch a pen to write
- Until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs;
- O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
- And plant in tyrants mild humility.
- From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
- They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
- They are the books, the arts, the academes,
- That show, contain and nourish all the world:
- Else none at all in ought proves excellent.