But like still-pining Tantalus he sits, But torment that it cannot cure his pain. "So then he hath it, when he cannot use it, The sweets we wish for turn to loathed sours, "Unruly blasts wait on the tender spring; But ill-annexed Opportunity Or kills his life, or else his quality. "O Opportunity! thy guilt is great: "Tis thou that execut'st the traitor's treason; "Thou mak'st the vestal violate her oath; Thy honey turns to gall, thy joy to grief! Thy secret pleasure turns to open shame, Thy private feasting to a public fast; b Thy smoothinga titles to a ragged name; How comes it then, vile Opportunity, Being so bad, such numbers seek for thee? "When wilt thou be the humble suppliant's friend, The poor, lame, blind, halt, creep, cry out for thee; "The patient dies while the physician sleeps; Wrath, envy, treason, rape, and murder's rages, When truth and virtue have to do with thee, My Collatine would else have come to me Smoothing-flattering. b Ragged is here used in the sense of contemptible. It means something broken, torn, and therefore worthless. See Note on Henry IV., Part II.,' Act I. Scene 1. Sort-assign, appropriate. So in Richard III. : "But I will sort a pitchy day for thee." d The constant allusions of the Elizabethan poets to that familiar terror the plague show how completely the evil, whether present or absent, was associated with the habitual thoughts of the people. Advice is here used in the sense of government, municipal or civil; and the line too correctly describes the carelessness of those in high places, who abated not their feasting and their revelry while pestilence was doing its terrible work around them. e 'Appay'd—satisfied, pleased. Well appayed, ill appayed, are constantly used by Chaucer and other ancient writers. 66 Guilty thou art of murder and of theft; 66 To all sins past, and all that are to come, Mis-shapen Time, copesmate of ugly night, Eater of youth, false slave to false delight, "Why hath thy servant, Opportunity, a "Time's glory is to calm contending kings, To wrong the wronger till he render right; To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, And smear with dust their glittering golden towers : "To fill with worm-holes stately monuments, To feed oblivion with decay of things, To blot old books, and alter their contents, To pluck the quills from ancient ravens' wings, a To fine-to bring to an end. b Springs-shoots, saplings. Time, which dries up the old oak's sap, cherishes the young plants. To spoil antiquities of hammer'd steel, And turn the giddy round of Fortune's wheel; "To show the beldame daughters of her daughter, To cheer the ploughman with increaseful crops, "Why work'st thou mischief in thy pilgrimage, Would purchase thee a thousand thousand friends, O, this dread night, wouldst thou one hour come back, "Thou ceaseless lackey to eternity, With some mischance cross Tarquin in his flight: To make him curse this cursed crimeful night: "Disturb his hours of rest with restless trances, Stone him with harden'd hearts, harder than stones; "Let him have time to tear his curled hair," Let him have time against himself to rave, Retiring is here used in the sense of coming back again. b Curled hair is the characteristic of Tarquin, as it was of all men of high rank Let him have time of Time's help to despair, And time to see one that by alms doth live "Let him have time to see his friends his foes, Have time to wail the abusing of his time. "O Time, thou tutor both to good and bad, Himself himself seek every hour to kill! Such wretched hands such wretched blood should spill: As slanderous death's-man to so base a slave? "The baser is he, coming from a king, "The crow may bathe his coal-black wings in mire, Poor grooms are sightless night, kings glorious day. in Shakspere's time. Perhaps it implied a notion of luxuriousness. In this way we have "the curled Antony;" and in Othello' "The wealthy curled darlings of our nation." ■ Unrecalling—not to be recalled. The elder writers use the participle with much more licence than we do. |