"Yet could he not his closing eyes withdraw, Though less and less of Emily he saw; So, speechless for a little space he lay; Then grasp'd the hand he held, and sigh'd his soul away."
When years rolling have in a manner exhausted the tears due to the remembrance of the heroic Arcite, a parliament, held upon matters of public interest, gives occasion to Theseus of requiring the attendance of Palamon from Thebes to Athens. The benign monarch, however, is revolving affairs of nearer and more private concern. The national council is assembled; Palamon is in his place, and Emelie has been called into presence. His majesty puts on a very serious countenance, fixes his eyes, heaves a sigh, and begins unburthening his bosom of its concealed purposes. He "begins from the beginning" in this fashion:--
"When the First Mover established the great chain of love, in which he bound the four elements, the mighty ordering proceeded of high wisdom. The same author, himself inaccessible to alteration, has appointed to all natural things the law of transiency and succession. The kinds endure; the individuals pass away. Nature examples us with decay. Trees, rivers, mighty towns, wax and wane--much more we. All must die--the great and the small: and the wish to live is an impiety. Better it is to fall in the pride of strength and in the splendour of renown, than to droop through long years into the grave; and the friend who survives should rejoice in his friend's happy and honourable departure. Wherefore, then, shall we longer mourn for Arcite?" This is the copious preamble. The conclusion is more briefly dispatched. Emelie must accept the hand of her faithful servant Palamon. He wants no persuasion; and the knot of matrimony happily ties up at last their destinies, wishes, and expectations, which the Tale in its progress has spun.
The royal harangue is long; and marked, doubtless, with a sort of artificial solemnity. However, it has a deliberative stateliness and a certain monarchal tone. _We_ do not now, in the Speeches from the Throne, begin regularly from the Creation--but that is a refinement. There has been eloquence of which Chaucer's deep display of philosophy and high deduction of argument is no ill-conceived representation. There is a grandeur in the earthly king's grounding his counsels in those of the heavenly King; and in his blending his own particular act of exerted kingly sway into the general system of things in the universe. The turn from the somewhat magniloquent dissertation to the parties immediately interested--the gentle disposing, between injunction and persuasion, of Emelie's will, and the frank call upon Palamon to come forward and take possession of his happiness, are natural, princely, and full of dramatic grace. Thus,--