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Home  »  Parnassus  »  William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, comp. (1803–1882). Parnassus: An Anthology of Poetry. 1880.

Crime

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)


BETWEEN the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council; and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection.

*****
(From Macbeth.)

TO beguile the time,

Look like the time.