Not for their love to virtue, but their ease;35
And parrot-rumour I that tale have taught.
By making love I hold the woman's grace;
'Tis the court double-key, and entrance gets
To all the little plots. The fiery spirits
My love to arms hath drawn into my faction:40
All but the minion of the time is mine,
And he shall be, or shall not be at all.
He that beholds a wing in pieces torn,
And knows not that to heav'n it once did bear
The high-flown and self-lessening bird, will think45
And call them idle subjects of the wind;
When he, that has the skill to imp and bind
These in right places, will thus truth discover,
That borrowed instruments do oft convey
The soul to her propos'd intents, and where50
Our stars deny, art may supply.[Exit
Enter Semanthe, Orithie, Orsames, Philan
Sem. Think you it is not then
The little jealousies, my lord, and fears;
Joy mix'd with doubt, and doubt reviv'd with hope,
That crowns all love with pleasure? these are lost,55
When once we come to full fruition,
Like waking in the morning, when all night
Our fancy has been fed with some new strange delight.
Ors. I grant you, madam, that the fears and joys,
Hopes and desires, mix'd with despairs and doubts,60
Do make the sport in love; [and] that they are
The very dogs by which we hunt the hare;
But, as the dogs would stop and straight give o'er,
Were it not for the little thing before,
So would our passions; both alike must be65
Flesh'd in the chase.
Ori. Will you, then, place the happiness but there,
Where the dull ploughman and the ploughman's horse
Can find it out? Shall souls refin'd not know
How to preserve alive a noble flame,70
But let it die—burn out to appetite?
Sem. Love's a chameleon, and would live on air,
Physic for agues; starving is his food.
Ors. Why, there it is now! a greater epicure
Lives not on earth. My lord and I have been75
In's privy kitchen, seen his bills of fare.
