Talk of Dreams...

For twenty five years (or more) this monologue has haunted me...  I know a few passages from Shakespeare, but this one I can recite without hesitation any day (notwithstanding the amount of wine or other spirits imbibed):

True, I talk of dreams;
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy;
Which is as thin of substance as the air,
And more inconstant than the wind, who woos
Even now the frozen bosom of the North
And, being angered, puffs away from thence,
Turning his side to the dew-dropping South.

Such hopelessness in the words, such aching desire for life and its mystery...  As if Mercutio knew that life, for him, would only remain a dream.