Page:Henry VI Part 1 (1918) Yale.djvu/51

King Henry the Sixth, II. v

And here I prophesy: this brawl to-day,

Grown to this faction in the Temple garden,

Shall send between the red rose and the white

A thousand souls to death and deadly night.

Plan. Good Master Vernon, I am bound to you,

That you on my behalf would pluck a flower.

Ver. In your behalf still would I wear the same.

Lawyer. And so will I.

Plan. Thanks, gentle sir.

Come, let us four to dinner: I dare say

This quarrel will drink blood another day.

Mor. Kind keepers of my weak decaying age,

Let dying Mortimer here rest himself.

Even like a man new haled from the rack,

So fare my limbs with long imprisonment;

And these gray locks, the pursuivants of death,

Nestor-like aged, in an age of care,

Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer.

These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent,

Wax dim, as drawing to their exigent;

Weak shoulders, overborne with burdening grief,

And pithless arms, like to a wither'd vine

That droops his sapless branches to the ground:

Yet are these feet whose strengthless stay is numb,

Unable to support this lump of clay,

 5 pursuivants: messengers

6 Cf. n.

7 Edmund Mortimer; cf. n.

9 exigent: end 