Come, poor babe: I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o' the dead May walk again: if such thing be, thy mother Appear'd to me last night, for ne'er was dream So like a waking. To me comes a creature, Sometimes her head on one side, some another; I never saw a vessel of like sorrow, So fill'd and so beco.

Taken from William Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale", the scene is from Act III scene iii of the play where Antigonus had been instructed by the dead queen through a dream to leave the infant daughter on the coast of Bohemia. This excerpt is the speech of Antigonus right at the moment when he decided to leave Perdita on the beach.

The speech details how he felt to be leaving an infant alone, on a dark cloudy day. But he reveals that even though he hardly belief in the existence of people talking to us in a dream, he has decided to do what his queen has told him to. His actions in leaving the poor baby girl alone in the shore will begin the start of a cycle of events that will bring about the reconciliation of the father and daughter in the future.