_Max._ Go, and to passion your esteem improve, While I command her to receive your love. [_Exit_ POR. _Enter_ ST CATHARINE. _S. Cath._ I come not now, as captive to your power, To beg; but as high heaven's ambassador, The laws of my religion to fulfil: Heaven sends me to return you good for ill. Your empress to your love I would restore, And to your mind the peace it had before. _Max._ While in another's name you peace declare, Princess, you in your own proclaim a war. Your too great power does your design oppose; You make those breaches which you strive to close. _S. Cath._ That little beauty, which too much you prize, Seeks not to move your heart, or draw your eyes: Your love to Berenice is due alone; Love, like that power which I adore, is one. When fixed to one, it safe at anchor rides, And dares the fury of the winds and tides; But losing once that hold, to the wide ocean borne. It drives away at will, to every wave a scorn. _Max._ If to new persons I my love apply, The stars and nature are in fault, not I: My loves are like my old prætorian bands, Whose arbitrary power their prince commands: I can no more make passion come or go, Than you can bid your Nilus ebb or flow. 'Tis lawless, and will love, and where it list; And that's no sin, which no man can resist: Those who impute it to me as a crime, Would make a god of me before my time. _S. Cath._ A god indeed, after the Roman stile, An eagle mounting from a kindled pile: But you may make yourself a god below; For kings, who rule their own desires, are so. You roam about, and never are at rest, By new desires, that is, new torments, still possest; Qualmish and loathing all you had before, Yet with a sickly appetite to more: As in a feverish dream you still drink on, And wonder why your thirst is never gone; Love, like a ghostly vision, haunts your mind, 'Tis still before you what you left behind. _Max._ How can I help those faults which nature made? My appetite is sickly and decayed, And you forbid me change, the sick man's ease! Who cannot cure, must humour his disease. _S. Cath._ Your mind should first the remedy begin; You seek without the cure that is within. The vain experiments you make each day, To find content, still finding it decay, Without attempting more, should let you see, That you have sought it where it ne'er could be. But when you place your joys on things above, You fix the wandering planet of your love: Thence you may see Poor human kind, all dazed in open day, Err after bliss, and blindly miss their way: The greatest happiness a prince can know, Is to love heaven above, do good below. _To them_ BERENICE _and Attendants_.