horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!

The transition at 'Do you see this?' from despair to something more than
hope is exactly the same as in the preceding passage at the word 'Ha!':

A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever!
Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.
Ha!
What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.

As to my other remarks, I will ask the reader to notice that the passage
from Lear's entrance with the body of Cordelia to the stage-direction
_He dies_ (which probably comes a few lines too soon) is 54 lines in
length, and that 30 of them represent the interval during which he has
absolutely forgotten Cordelia. (It begins when he looks up at the
Captain's words, line 275.) To make Lear during this interval turn
continually in anguish to the corpse, is to act the passage in a manner
irreconcilable with the text, and insufferable in its effect. I speak
from experience. I have seen the passage acted thus, and my sympathies
were so exhausted long before Lear's death that his last speech, the
most pathetic speech ever written, left me disappointed and weary.]

[Footnote 163: The Quartos give the 'Never' only thrice (surely
wrongly), and all the actors I have heard have preferred this easier
task. I ought perhaps to add that the Quartos give the words 'Break,
heart; I prithee, break!' to Lear, not Kent. They and the Folio are at
odds throughout the last sixty lines of King Lear, and all good modern
texts are eclectic.]

[Footnote 164: The connection of these sufferings with the sin of
earlier days (not, it should be noticed, of youth) is almost thrust upon
our notice by the levity of Gloster's own reference to the subject in
the first scene, and by Edgar's often quoted words 'The gods are just,'
etc. The following collocation, also, may be intentional (III. iv. 116):

_Fool_. Now a little fire in a wild field were like an old
lecher's heart; a small spark, all the rest on's body cold.
Look, here comes a walking fire. [_Enter_ GLOSTER with a
torch.]

Pope destroyed the collocation by transferring the stage-direction to a
point some dozen lines later.]