All's Well That Ends Well (2 of 36)

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SCENE 1. (CONT'D)

BERTRAM.
The best wishes that can be forg'd in your thoughts [To HELENA.]be servants to you! Be comfortable to my mother, your mistress,
and make much of her.

LAFEU.
Farewell, pretty lady: you must hold the credit of your father.

[Exeunt BERTRAM and LAFEU.]

HELENA.
O, were that all!--I think not on my father;
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him; my imagination
Carries no favour in't but Bertram's.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
The ambition in my love thus plagues itself:
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour; to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart's table,--heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour:
But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his relics. Who comes here?
One that goes with him: I love him for his sake;
And yet I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, solely a coward;
Yet these fix'd evils sit so fit in him
That they take place when virtue's steely bones
Looks bleak i' the cold wind: withal, full oft we see
Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.

[Enter PAROLLES.]

PAROLLES.
Save you, fair queen!

HELENA.
And you, monarch!

PAROLLES.
No.

HELENA.
And no.

PAROLLES.
Are you meditating on virginity?

HELENA.
Ay. You have some stain of soldier in you: let me ask you a
question. Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it
against him?

PAROLLES.
Keep him out.

HELENA.
But he assails; and our virginity, though valiant in the
defence, yet is weak: unfold to us some warlike resistance.

PAROLLES.
There is none: man, setting down before you, will undermine you
and blow you up.

HELENA.
Bless our poor virginity from underminers and blowers-up!--Is
there no military policy how virgins might blow up men?

PAROLLES.
Virginity being blown down, man will quicklier be blown up:
marry, in blowing him down again, with the breach yourselves
made, you lose your city. It is not politic in the commonwealth
of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational
increase; and there was never virgin got till virginity was first
lost. That you were made of is metal to make virgins. Virginity
by being once lost may be ten times found; by being ever kept, it
is ever lost: 'tis too cold a companion; away with it!

HELENA.
I will stand for 't a little, though therefore I die a virgin.

PAROLLES.
There's little can be said in't; 'tis against the rule of
nature. To speak on the part of virginity is to accuse your
mothers; which is most infallible disobedience. He that hangs
himself is a virgin: virginity murders itself; and should be
buried in highways, out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate
offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a
cheese; consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with
feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud,
idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the
canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by't: out with't!
within ten years it will make itself ten, which is a goodly
increase; and the principal itself not much the worse: away with
it!

HELENA.
How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?

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