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ENOBARBUS. The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, | |
| Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold; | |
| Purple the sails, and so perfumed that | |
| The winds were lovesick with them: the oars were silver; | |
| Which to the time of flutes kept stroke, and made | 5 |
| The water, which they beat, to follow faster, | |
| As amorous of their strokes. For her own person, | |
| It beggared all description: she did lie | |
| In her pavilion (cloth of gold, of tissue) | |
| O’er-picturing that Venus, where we see | 10 |
| The fancy outwork nature: on each side her | |
| Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, | |
| With diverse-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem | |
| To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, | |
And what they undid, did.
AGRIPPA. O, rare for Antony! | 15 |
| ENO. Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids, | |
| So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes, | |
| And made their bends adornings; at the helm | |
| A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle | |
| Smell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, | 20 |
| That yarely frame the office. From the barge | |
| A strange invisible perfume hits the sense | |
| Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast | |
| Her people out upon her; and Antony, | |
| Enthron’d i’ the market-place, did sit alone, | 25 |
| Whistling to th’ air; which, but for vacancy, | |
| Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, | |
| And made a gap in nature. | |
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