GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phœbus' lodging: such a waggoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the West,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.—
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway's eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.—
Now, whether right or wrong in my ensuing conjecture as to "runaway's eyes" (or, as the First Folio has it, "run-awayes eyes"), I feel assured, through both instinct and analysis, that young Shakespeare had the Faustus soliloquy by heart,—that its every phrase and cadence tingled in his own fibre when he wrote the adjuration of our impassioned and free-spoken Juliet. For, look you,—over and above the rhythm and syntax, the turns of the phrases, the explicatory "That" similarly placed in both passages,—note that Juliet's demand for haste is merely the converse of Faustus's wild cry for postponement, just as her whole apostrophe betokens joy and rapturous expectation, and his—hopeless gloom, the recoil of fierce despair.
There are natural changes in the order. Translate Marlowe's O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!—
O gently, gently foot it, steeds of night!
and you have the converse of
Gallop apace, you fiery- footed steeds!
But to the very point. Marlowe bids Fair Nature's eye rise again and make perpetual day: he adjures
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