choice, and think me
rarely blessed in a wife." And then he addressed her in courtly terms,
as if the lowly-seeming maid had been the high-born lady he wished to
find her, calling her _Fair and beautiful Marina_, telling her a great
prince on board that ship had fallen into a sad and mournful silence;
and, as if Marina had the power of conferring health and felicity, he
begged she would undertake to cure the royal stranger of his melancholy.
"Sir," said Marina, "I will use my utmost skill in his recovery,
provided none but I and my maid be suffered to come near him."

She, who at Mitylene had so carefully concealed her birth, ashamed to
tell that one of royal ancestry was now a slave, first began to speak to
Pericles of the wayward changes in her own fate, telling him from what a
high estate herself had fallen. As if she had known it was her royal
father she stood before, all the words she spoke were of her own
sorrows; but her reason for so doing was, that she knew nothing more
wins the attention of the unfortunate than the recital of some sad
calamity to match their own. The sound of her sweet voice aroused the
drooping prince; he lifted up his eyes, which had been so long fixed and
motionless; and Marina, who was the perfect image of her mother,
presented to his amazed sight the features of his dead queen. The
long-silent prince was once more heard to speak. "My dearest wife," said
the awakened Pericles, "was like this maid, and such a one might my
daughter have been. My queen's square brows, her stature to an inch, as
wand-like straight, as silver-voiced, her eyes as jewel-like. Where do
you live, young maid? Report your parentage. I think you said you had
been tossed from wrong to injury, and that you thought your griefs would
equal mine, if both were opened." "Some such thing I said," replied
Marina, "and said no more than what my thoughts did warrant me as
likely." "Tell me your story," answered Pericles; "if I find you have
known the thousandth part of my endurance, you have borne your sorrows
like a man, and I have suffered like a girl; yet you do look like
Patience gazing on kings' graves, and smiling extremity out of act. How
lost you your name, my most kind virgin? Recount your story I beseech
you. Come, sit by me." How was Pericles surprised when she said her name
was _Marina_, for he knew it was no usual name, but had been invented by
himself for his own child to signify _seaborn_: "O, I am mocked," said
h