Page:Henry IV Part 1 (1917) Yale.djvu/71

King Henry the Fourth, III. i

And uncle Worcester? A plague upon it!

I have forgot the map.

Glend.No, here it is.

Sit, cousin Percy; sit, good cousin Hotspur;

For by that name as oft as Lancaster

Doth speak of you, his cheek looks pale and with

A rising sigh he wisheth you in heaven.

Hot. And you in hell, as often as he hears

Owen Glendower spoke of.

Glend. I cannot blame him: at my nativity

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,

Of burning cressets; and at my birth

The frame and huge foundation of the earth

Shak'd like a coward.

Hot. Why, so it would have done at the same

season, if your mother's cat had but kittened,

though yourself had never been born.

Glend. I say the earth did shake when I was born.

Hot. And I say the earth was not of my mind,

If you suppose as fearing you it shook.

Glend. The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.

Hot. O! then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire.

And not in fear of your nativity.

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth

In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth

Is with a kind of colic pinch'd and vex'd

By the imprisoning of unruly wind

Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,

Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down

Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth

 8 Lancaster: the king

15 cressets: beacon lights

31 enlargement: release

32 beldam: grandmother 