Sir Guyon was not safer in Phædria's “gondelay bedecked trim” than thou art on “this wide inland sea,” in my ship That knows her port and thither sails by aim; Ne care, ne fear I how the wind do blow; Or whether swift I wend, or whether slow, Both slow and swift alike do serve my turn.[3] My turn is served for the present, and yours also. The question who was Mrs. Dove? propounded for future solution in the second Chapter P. I., and for immediate consideration at the conclusion of the 71st Chapter and the beginning of the 72nd, has been sufficiently answered. You have been made acquainted with her birth, parentage and education; and you may rest assured that if the Doctor had set out upon a tour, like Cœlebs, in search of a wife, he could never have found one who would in all respects have suited him better. What Shakespeare says of the Dauphin and the Lady Blanch might seem to have been said with a second sight of this union: Such as she is Is this our Doctor, every way complete; If not complete, O say, he is not she: And she again wants nothing, to name want, If want it be not, that she is not he. He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such a she; And she a fair divided excellence Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. [Footnote 2: QUARLES: _mutatis mutandis_.] [Footnote 3: SPENSER.] You would wish me perhaps to describe her person. Sixty years had “written their defeatures in her face” before I became acquainted with her; yet by what those years had left methinks I could conceive what she had been in her youth. Go to your looking glasses, young ladies,—and you will not be so well able to imagine by what you see there, how you will look when you shall have shaken hands with Threescore. One of the Elizabethan minor-poets, speaking of an ideal beauty says, Into a slumber then I fell, When fond Imagination Seemed to see, but could not tell, Her feature, or her fashion. But even as babes in dreams do smile, And sometimes fall a weeping, So I awaked, as wise this while, As when I fell a-sleeping.