Page:A Midsummer-Nights Dream (Rackham).djvu/172

tinker! Starveling! God’s my life, stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most vile vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was,—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,—and methought I had,—but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream : it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke: peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. [Exit.