If then we hunt for death, why do we fear it?
If we fear it, why do we follow it?
(Let me intimate a doubt in passing, whether Shakespeare would ever have
put by the mouth of any but a farcical mask a query so provocative of
response from an Irish echo--"Because we can't help.")
If we do fear, with fear we do but aid
The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner;
If we fear not, then no resolved proffer
Can overthrow the limit of our fate:
and so forth. Again the hastiest reader will have been reminded of a
passage in the transcendant central scenes of _Measure for Measure_:
Merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,
And yet runn'st toward him still;
and hence also some may infer that this pitiful penny-whistle was blown
by the same breath which in time gained power to fill that archangelic
trumpet. Credat Zoilus Shakespearomastix, non ego.
The next scene is something better than passable, but demands no special
analysis and affords no necessary extract. We may just observe as
examples of style the play on words between the flight of hovering ravens
and the flight of routed soldiers, and the description of the sudden fog
Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven,
And made at noon a night unnatural
Upon the quaking and dismayed world.
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