O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month—
Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month; or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:—why she, even she—
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

Sweet was the youth of virgin Poesy,
That virgin sweetness which she gave to thee,
My SPENSER, bard of happy innocence!
For thou didst with a bridegroom’s love intense
Caress the fair inventions of thy brain,
Those babes of paradise, without the pain
Of mortal birth, to fairest heritage
Born in the freshness of their perfect age.
Thy Faery Knight had all the world in fee,
For all the world was Faeryland to thee.
Thine is no tale, once acted, then forgot;
Thy creatures never were, and never will be not.
Oh! look not for them in the dark abyss
Where all things have been, and where nothing is
The spectral past; —nor in the troubled sea
Where all strange fancies are about to be —
The unabiding present. Seek them where
For ever lives the Good, the True, the Fair,
In the eternal silence of the heart.
There Spenser found them; thence his magic art
Their shades evoked in feature, form, and limb,
Real as a human self, and bright as cherubim.
And what though wistful love and emulous arms,
And all the wizard might of mutter’d charms,—
Though slimy snakes disgorge their loathly rage,
And monstrous phantoms wait on Archimage:
These are but dreams, that come, and go, and peep
Through the thin curtain of a morning sleep,
And leave no pressure on the soul, that wakes
And hails the glad creation that it makes.