As any three-days' moon--you are shifting always
Uneasily and stiff, now, on your seat,
As from some secret pain.

Eliz. Why watch me thus?
You cannot know--and yet you know too much--
I tell you, nurse, pain's comfort, when the flesh
Aches with the aching soul in harmony,
And even in woe, we are one: the heart must speak
Its passion's strangeness in strange symbols out,
Or boil, till it bursts inly.

Guta. Yet, methinks,
You might have made this widowed solitude
A holy rest--a spell of soft gray weather,
Beneath whose fragrant dews all tender thoughts
Might bud and burgeon.

Eliz. That's a gentle dream;
But nature shows nought like it: every winter,
When the great sun has turned his face away,
The earth goes down into the vale of grief,
And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables,
Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay--
Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses--
As I may yet!--

Isen. There, now--my foolish child!
You faint: come--come to your chamber--