Page images
PDF
EPUB

From thy admiring daughter ta'en the spirits,
Standing like stone beside thee!

are touches of character conveyed indirectly, and

which serve to give a more finished effect to this beautiful picture.

[graphic]

cumstances raise Olivia in our fancy, and render her caprice for the page a source of amusement and interest, not a subject of reproach. The whole

comedy is a perpetual spring of the gayest and the sweetest fancies.

A woman's affections, however strong, are sentiments, when they run smooth; and become passions only when opposed.

In Juliet and Helena, love is depicted as a passion, properly so called; that is, a natural impulse throbbing in the heart's blood, and mingling with the very sources of life;- -a sentiment more or less modified by the imagination; a strong abiding principle and motive, excited by resistance, acting upon the will, animating all the other faculties, and again influenced by them. This is the most complex aspect of love, and in these two characters it is depicted in colours at once the most various, the most intense, and the most brilliant.

In Viola and Perdita, love, being less complex, appears more refined; more a sentiment than a passion—a compound of impulse and fancy, while the reflective powers and moral energies are more faintly developed. The same remark applies also to Julia and Silvia, in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and in a greater degree to Hermia and Helen in the Midsummer Night's Dream. In the two latter, though perfectly dis

criminated, love takes the visionary, fanciful cast, which belongs to the whole piece: it is scarcely a passion or a sentiment, but a dreamy enchantment, a reverie, which a fairy spell dissolves or rivets at pleasure.

But there was yet another possible modification of the sentiment, as combined with female nature; and this Shakspeare has shown to us. He has pourtrayed two beings in whom all intellectual and moral energy is in a manner latent, if existing ; in whom love is an unconscious impulse, and imagination lends the external charm and hue, not the internal power; in whom the feminine character appears resolved into its very elementary principles-as modesty, grace,* tenderness. Without these, a woman is no woman, but a thing which, luckily, wants a name yet; with these, though every

By this word, as used here, I would be understood to mean that inexpressible something within the soul, which tends to the good, the beautiful, the true, and is the antipodes to the vulgar, the violent, and the false ;-that which we see diffused externally over the form and movements, where there is perfect innocence and unconsciousness, as in children.

cal personage, though a little passionate and fantastic-had already made some impression on Viola's imagination; and when she comes to play the confidante, and to be loaded with favours and kindness in her assumed character, that she should be touched by a passion made up of pity, admiration, gratitude, and tenderness, does not, I think, in any way detract from the genuine sweetness and delicacy of her character, for "she never told her love."

« PreviousContinue »