Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/300

 oaks. Rosalind goes about pulling them down, and is in the best of spirits when Touchstone declares that he could "rhyme you so, eight years together; dinners, and suppers, and sleeping-hours excepted:" his verses have the regular butter-woman's jog-trot. She was never so nearly berhymed to death since she was an Irish rat in the time of Pythagoras. But, for all that, she is full of bliss to discover that this fancy-monger of rhymes is Orlando; and she is dying to know "what did he? What said he? How look'd he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again? Answer me in one word." To be sure, she wears a double disguise of wit and male attire; so when Orlando says to her, "Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love," it is easy for her to reply, "Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is apter to do than to confess she does; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences." But when, pretending to ridicule his emotion, she tells him that "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love," he protests that Rosalind's frown might kill him. "By this hand," she says, "it will not kill a fly." So all the exuberant frolic of these fine women is the sparkle of healthy brains: the heart's-blood of love does not trickle through hepatic sentiment, but is briskly pumped through the lungs up into the head, flashes from the eye, and becomes a ruddy zest upon the tongue.