In Palamon a manly grief appears;
  Silent, he wept, ashamed to show his tears: 
  Emilia shriek’d but once, and then, oppress’d
  With sorrow, sunk upon her lover’s breast: 
  Till Theseus in his arms convey’d with care,
  Far from so sad a sight, the swooning fair. 
  ’Twere loss of time her sorrow to relate; 860
  Ill bears the sex a youthful lover’s fate,
  When just approaching to the nuptial state. 
  But like a low-hung cloud, it rains so fast,
  That all at once it falls, and cannot last. 
  The face of things is changed, and Athens now,
  That laugh’d so late, becomes the scene of woe: 
  Matrons and maids, both sexes, every state,
  With tears lament the knight’s untimely fate. 
  Nor greater grief in falling Troy was seen
  For Hector’s death; but Hector was not then, 870
  Old men with dust deform’d their hoary hair,
  The women beat their breasts, their cheeks they tear. 
  Why wouldst thou go, with one consent they cry,
  When thou hadst gold enough, and Emily?

    Theseus himself, who should have cheer’d the grief
  Of others, wanted now the same relief;
  Old Egeus only could revive his son,
  Who various changes of the world had known,
  And strange vicissitudes of human fate,
  Still altering, never in a steady state; 880
  Good after ill, and, after pain, delight,
  Alternate like the scenes of day and night: 
  Since every man who lives, is born to die,
  And none can boast sincere felicity,
  With equal mind, what happens, let us bear,
  Nor joy, nor grieve too much for things beyond our care. 
  Like pilgrims to the appointed place we tend;
  The world’s an inn, and death the journey’s end. 
  Even kings but play; and when their part is done,
  Some other, worse or better, mount the throne. 890
  With words like these the crowd was satisfied,
  And so they would have been, had Theseus died. 
  But he, their king, was labouring in his mind,
  A fitting place for funeral pomps to find,
  Which were in honour of the dead design’d. 
  And after long debate, at last he found
  (As love itself had mark’d the spot of ground)
  That grove for ever green, that conscious laund,
  Where he with Palamon fought hand to hand: 
  That where he fed his amorous desires 900
  With soft complaints, and felt his hottest fires;
  There other flames might waste his earthly part,
  And burn his limbs, where love had burn’d his heart.

    This once resolved, the peasants were enjoin’d
  Sere-wood, and firs, and dodder’d oaks to find. 
  With sounding axes to the grove they go,
  Fell, split, and lay the fuel on a row,
  Vulcanian food:  a bier is next prepared,
  On which the lifeless body should be rear’d,