The excess of maternal tenderness, rendered desparate by the
fickleness of friends and the injustice of fortune, and made
stronger in will, in proportion to the want of all other power, was
never more finely expressed than in Constance, The dignity of her
answer to King Philip, when she refuses to accompany his messenger,
'To me and to the state of my great grief, let kings assemble,' her
indignant reproach to Austria for deserting her cause, her
invocation to death, 'that love of misery', however fine and
spirited, all yield to the beauty of the passage, where, her passion
subsiding into tenderness, she addresses the Cardinal in these
words:
Oh father Cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heav'n:
If that be, I shall see my boy again,
For since the birth of Cain, the first male child,
To him that did but yesterday suspire,
There was not such a gracious creature born.
But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud,
And chase the native beauty from his cheek,
And he will look as hollow as a ghost,
As dim and meagre as an ague's fit,
And so he'll die; and rising so again,
When I shall meet him in the court of heav'n,
I shall not know him; therefore never, never
Must I behold my pretty Arthur more.
K. Philip.
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