to stay with her that night,
and by daybreak pursue his journey alone to Mantua; to which place the
good friar promised to send him letters from time to time, acquainting
him with the state of affairs at home.

That night Romeo passed with his dear wife, gaining secret admission to
her chamber, from the orchard in which he had heard her confession of
love the night before. That had been a night of unmixed joy and
rapture; but the pleasures of this night, and the delight which these
lovers took in each other's society, were sadly allayed with the
prospect of parting, and the fatal adventures of the past day. The
unwelcome daybreak seemed to come 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 sang, 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 daybreak.

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 show 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 s