A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins.

Then to Silvia let us sing that Silvia is excelling. She excels each mortal thing upon the dull earth dwelling.

Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty like a Scotch jig--and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance and with his bad legs falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.

And sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, Steal me awhile from mine own company.

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

For this relief much thanks. 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.