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V



Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter, and confounds him there;

Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:

Then were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:

  But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,

  Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

 	--William Shakespeare

CXV



Those lines that I before have writ do lie,

Even those that said I could not love you dearer:

Yet then my judgment knew no reason why

My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer.

But reckoning Time, whose million'd accidents

Creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,

Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents,

Divert strong minds to the course of altering things;

Alas! why fearing of Time's tyranny,

Might I not then say, 'Now I love you best,'

When I was certain o'er incertainty,

Crowning the present, doubting of the rest?

  Love is a babe, then might I not say so,

  To give full growth to that which still doth grow?



CXVI



Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error and upon me prov'd,

  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

 	--William Shakespeare