lies, Where shall I live now Lucrece is unlived? Thou wast not to this end from me derived. If children predecease progenitors, We are their offspring, and they none of ours. 

 “Poor broken glass, I often did behold In thy sweet semblance my old age new born; But now that fair fresh mirror, dim and old, Shows me a bare-boned death by time outworn. O, from thy cheeks my image thou hast torn, And shivered all the beauty of my glass, That I no more can see what once I was! 

 “O time, cease thou thy course and last no longer, If they surcease to be that should survive! Shall rotten death make conquest of the stronger, And leave the falt’ring feeble souls alive? The old bees die, the young possess their hive. Then live, sweet Lucrece, live again and see Thy father die, and not thy father thee!” 

 By this starts Collatine as from a dream, And bids Lucretius give his sorrow place; And then in key-cold Lucrece’ bleeding stream He falls, and bathes the pale fear in his face, And counterfeits to die with her a space; Till manly shame bids him possess his breath, And live to be revenged on her death. 

 The deep vexation of his inward soul Hath served a dumb arrest upon his tongue; Who, mad that sorrow should his use control Or keep him from heart-easing words so long, Begins to talk; but through his lips do throng Weak words, so thick come in his poor heart’s aid That no man could distinguish what he said. 

 Yet sometime “Tarquin” was pronounced plain, But through his teeth, as if the name he tore. This windy tempest, till it blow up rain, Held back his sorrow’s tide, to make it more. At last it rains, and busy winds give o’er. Then son and father weep with equal strife Who should weep most, for daughter or for wife. 

 The one doth call her his, the other his, Yet neither may possess the claim they lay, The father says “She’s mine.” “O, mine she is,” Replies her husband. “Do not take away My sorrow’s interest; let no mourner say He weeps for her, for she was only mine, And only must be wailed by Collatine.” 

 “O,” quoth Lucretius, “I did give that life Which she too early and too late hath spilled.” “Woe, woe,” quoth Collatine, “she was my wife, I owed her, and ’tis mine that she hath killed.” “My daughter” and “my wife” with clamours filled The dispersed air, who, holding Lucrece’ life, Answered their cries, “my daughter” and “my wife”. 

 Brutus, who plucked the knife from Lucrece’ 

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