So many miles upon her peaceful bosom, Frighting her pale-fac'd visages with war?-- waking, according to Richard, Our peace, which in our country's cradle, Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep:-- bedrenching "with crimson tempest" The fresh green lap of fair king Richard's land:-- frighting "fair peace" from "our quiet confines," laying The summer's dust with showers of blood, Rained from the wounds of slaughter'd Englishmen: bruising Her flowerets with the armed hoofs Of hostile paces. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to note in this play a peculiar recoil from the mere instruments of warfare, the contact of the "rude ribs," the "flint bosom," of Barkloughly Castle or Pomfret or Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower: the Boisterous untun'd drums With harsh-resounding trumpets' dreadful bray And grating shock of wrathful iron arms. It is as if the lax, soft beauty of the king took effect, at least by contrast, on everything beside. One gracious prerogative, certainly, Shakespeare's [194] English kings possess: they are a very eloquent company, and Richard is the most sweet-tongued of them all. In no other play perhaps is there such a flush of those gay, fresh, variegated flowers of speech--colour and figure, not lightly attached to, but fused into, the very phrase itself--which Shakespeare cannot help dispensing to his characters, as in this "play of the Deposing of King Richard the Second," an exquisite poet if he is nothing else, from first to last, in light and gloom alike, able to see all things poetically, to give a poetic turn to his conduct of them, and refreshing with his golden language the tritest aspects of that ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and the actual necessities of his destiny. What a garden of words! With him, blank verse, infinitely graceful, deliberate, musical in inflexion, becomes indeed a true "verse royal," that rhyming lapse, which to the Shakespearian ear, at least in youth, came as the last touch of refinement on it, being here doubly appropriate. His eloquence blends with that fatal beauty, of which he was so frankly aware, so amiable to his friends, to his wife, of the effects of which on the people his enemies were so much afraid, on which Shakespeare himself dwells so attentively as the "royal blood" comes and goes in the face with his rapid changes of temper. As happens with sensitive natures, it attunes him to a congruous suavity of manners, by which anger itself became flattering: [195] it blends with his merely youthful hopefulness and high spirits, his sympathetic love for gay people, things, apparel--"his cote of gold and stone, valued at thirty thousand marks," the novel Italian fashions he preferred, as also with those real amiabilities that made people forget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of the pathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed merely abject in a less graceful performer.