Estrella (Kneeling.)
     Oh, Royal Sir!—­

     Astolfo (Kneeling.)
     God save your Majesty—­

     King. 
     Rise both of you,
     Rise to my arms, Astolfo and Estrella;
     As my two sisters’ children always mine,
     Now more than ever, since myself and Poland
     Solely to you for our succession look’d. 
     And now give ear, you and your several factions,
     And you, the Peers and Princes of this realm,
     While I reveal the purport of this meeting
     In words whose necessary length I trust
     No unsuccessful issue shall excuse. 
     You and the world who have surnamed me “Sage”
     Know that I owe that title, if my due,
     To my long meditation on the book
     Which ever lying open overhead—­
     The book of heaven, I mean—­so few have read;
     Whose golden letters on whose sapphire leaf,
     Distinguishing the page of day and night,
     And all the revolution of the year;
     So with the turning volume where they lie
     Still changing their prophetic syllables,
     They register the destinies of men: 
     Until with eyes that, dim with years indeed,
     Are quicker to pursue the stars than rule them,
     I get the start of Time, and from his hand
     The wand of tardy revelation draw. 
     Oh, had the self-same heaven upon his page
     Inscribed my death ere I should read my life
     And, by fore-casting of my own mischance,
     Play not the victim but the suicide
     In my own tragedy!—­But you shall hear. 
     You know how once, as kings must for their people,
     And only once, as wise men for themselves,
     I woo’d and wedded:  know too that my Queen
     In childing died; but not, as you believe,
     With her, the son she died in giving life to. 
     For, as the hour of birth was on the stroke,
     Her brain conceiving with her womb, she dream’d
     A serpent tore her entrail.  And too surely
     (For evil omen seldom speaks in vain)
     The man-child breaking from that living tomb
     That makes our birth the antitype of death,
     Man-grateful, for the life she gave him paid
     By killing her:  and with such circumstance
     As suited such unnatural tragedy;
     He coming into light, if light it were
     That darken’d at his very horoscope,
     When heaven’s two champions—­sun and moon I mean—­
     Suffused in blood upon each other fell
     In such a raging duel of eclipse
     As hath not terrified the universe
     Since that which wept in blood the death of Christ: 
     When the dead walk’d, the waters turn’d to blood,
     Earth and her cities totter’d, and the world
     Seem’d shaken to its last paralysis. 
     In such a paroxysm of dissolution
     That son of mine was born; by that first act