Page:Romeo and Juliet (Dowden).djvu/164

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.5

Rom.	It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale: look, love, what envious[E 1] streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east: Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain[C 1] tops:10 I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

Jul.	Yond[C 2] light is not daylight, I know it, I: It is some meteor that the sun exhales,[C 3][E 2] To be to thee this night a torch-bearer,[E 3] And light thee on thy way to Mantua:15 Therefore stay yet;[E 4] thou need'st not to be gone.[C 4]

Rom.	Let me be ta'en, let me be put to death; I am content, so thou wilt have it so. I'll say yon grey is not the morning's eye, 'Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow;[E 5]20 Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:

1. 10. mountain] Q; Mountaines Q 3, F.
2. 12. Yond] Q, F; Yon Q 1.
3. 13. exhales] F, exhale Q.
4. 16. Therefore … gone] Q, F; Then stay awhile, thou shalt not goe soone Q 1 (and Pope, reading so soon).

of that year, "in Italy and in Spayne." Knight quotes, from Russel's account of Aleppo, a description of the nightingale singing from the pomegranate grove. It is the male bird—"he" not "she"—who is the chief singer; but the tale of Tereus and Philomela encouraged the opposite notion.

1. 7. envious] malicious, as often in Shakespeare.
2. 13. exhales] Meteors were supposed to be derived from matter drawn up by the sun; see 1 Henry IV. V. i. 19, and Person's Varieties (1635), "Of Meteors."
3. 14. torch-bearer] Todd quotes parallels for a similar use of the image from Sidney's Arcadia, Sir J. Davies' Orchestra, and Drayton's England's Heroical Epistles.
4. 16. stay yet;] Rowe connected yet with what follows: "stay, yet."
5. 20. Cynthia's brow] In Singer's copy of F 2 brow was corrected in MS. to bow; so too Collier (MS.); brow may mean forehead or countenance. Rolfe understands that the moon is conceived as rising, and that the reflex or reflection is from the edges of the clouds lit up by the moon behind them. Clarke suggests an allusion to the crescent borne on Diana's forehead.