If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!
If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!
- Source
- Familiar Quotations, ninth edition (1905 printing)
Twelfth Night. Act i. Sc. 1.
Read the original context ↗ - Attribution confidence
- attributed · historical anthology
Preserved as printed; independently unverified. - Historical coordinate
- c. 1590 AD · renaissance
author lifetime midpoint; not composition date. - Rights & edition
- Public domain (United States)
Translations and rights may differ elsewhere.
Provenance and licences ↗
Word-matched topics
The voice behind the words.
Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.
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