So I lose none / In seeking to augment it, but still keep / My bosom franchis’d, and allegiance clear, / I shall be counsell’d.

Now o’er the one half-world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtain’d sleep. Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Hecate’s off’rings; and wither’d murder, / Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, / Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, / With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design / Moves like a ghost.—

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

A little water clears us of this deed: / How easy is it then!

List’ning their fear, I could not say “Amen,” / When they did say, “God bless us.”

These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad.

The sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures. ’Tis the eye of childhood / That fears a painted devil.

I have done the deed.—Didst thou not hear a noise?

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! / Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence / The life o’ th’ building.

Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, / And look on death itself!