and upon that breast of thine?
Why holds thine eye that lamentable rheum,
Like a proud river peering o'er his bounds?
Be these sad signs confirmers of thy words?

* * * *

Fellow, begone! I cannot brook thy sight--
This news hath made thee a most ugly man!

It is the power of imagination which gives so peculiar a tinge to the
maternal tenderness of Constance; she not only loves her son with the
fond instinct of a mother's affection, but she loves him with her
poetical imagination, exults in his beauty and his royal birth, hangs
over him with idolatry, and sees his infant brow already encircled with
the diadem. Her proud spirit, her ardent enthusiastic fancy, and her
energetic self-will, all combine with her maternal love to give it that
tone and character which belongs to her only: hence that most beautiful
address to her son, which coming from the lips of Constance, is as full
of nature and truth as of pathos and poetry, and which we could hardly
sympathize with in any other:--

ARTHUR.

I do beseech you, madam, be content.

CONSTANCE.

If thou, that bid'st me be content, wert grim,
Ugly, and slanderous to thy mother's womb,
Full of unpleasing blots and sightless stains,
Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious.
Patched with foul moles and eye-offending marks,
I would not care--I then would be content;
For then I should not love thee; no, nor thou
Become thy great birth, nor deserve a crown.
But thou art fair, and at thy birth, dear boy!
Nature and Fortune join'd to make thee great:
Of Nature's gifts thou mayest with lilies boast,
And with the half-blown rose: but Fortune, O!
She is corrupted, chang'd, and won from thee;
She adulterates hourly with thine uncle John;
And with her golden hand hath pluck'd on France
To tread down fair respect of sovereignty.

It is this exceeding vivacity of imagination which in the end turns
sorrow to frenzy. Constance is not only a bereaved and doating mother,
but a generous woman, betrayed by her own rash confidence; in whose mind
the sense of injury mingling with the sense of grief, and her impetuous
temper conflicting with her pride, combine to overset her reason; yet
she is not mad: and how admirably, how forcibly she herself draws the
distinction between the frantic violence of uncontrolled feeling and
actual madness!--