too soon, and when Juliet heard the
morning-song of the lark, she would have persuaded herself that it was
the nightingale, which sings by night; but it was too truly the lark
which sung, and a discordant and unpleasing note it seemed to her; and
the streaks of day in the east too certainly pointed out that it was
time for these lovers to part. Romeo took his leave of his dear wife
with a heavy heart, promising to write to her from Mantua every hour
in the day, and when he had descended from her chamber-window, as he
stood below her on the ground, in that sad foreboding state of mind in
which she was he appeared to her eyes as one dead in the bottom of a
tomb. Romeo's mind misgave him in like manner; but now he was forced
hastily to depart, for it was death for him to be found within the
walls of Verona after day-break.

This was but the beginning of the tragedy of this pair of star-crossed
lovers. Romeo had not been gone many days, before the old lord Capulet
proposed a match for Juliet. The husband he had chosen for her, not
dreaming that she was married already, was count Paris, a gallant,
young, and noble gentleman, no unworthy suitor to the young Juliet,
if she had never seen Romeo.

The terrified Juliet was in a sad perplexity at her father's offer.
She pleaded her youth unsuitable to marriage, the recent death of
Tybalt which had left her spirits too weak to meet a husband with
any face of joy, and how indecorous it would shew for the family of
the Capulets to be celebrating a nuptial-feast, when his funeral
solemnities were hardly over: she pleaded every reason against the
match, but the true one, namely, that she was married already. But
lord Capulet was deaf to all her excuses, and in a peremptory manner
ordered her to get ready, for by the following Thursday she should
be married to Paris: and having found her a husband rich, young, and
noble, such as the proudest maid in Verona might joyfully accept, he
could not bear that out of an affected coyness, as he construed her
denial, she should oppose obstacles to her own good fortune.

In this extremity Juliet applied to the friendly friar, always her
counsellor in distress, and he asking her if she had resolution to
undertake a desperate remedy, and she answering that she would go into
the grave alive, rather than marry Paris, her own dear husband living,
he directed her to go home, and appear merry, and give her consent to
marry Paris, according to her fathe