The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Other slow arts entirely keep the brain:
And therefore finding barren practisers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil:
But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power;
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye,
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious tread of theft is stopp'd:
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible,
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste;
For valor, is not love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides ?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical,
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;
And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write,
Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs;
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world;
Else, none at all in aught proves excellent;
Then fools you were these women to forswear;
Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove
fools.
For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love;
Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men;
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women;
Or women's sake, by whom we men are men;
Let us once lose our oaths, to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths:
It is religion, to be thus forsworn:

For charity itself fulfils the law:

And who can sever love from charity?—

This is quite a study;-sometimes you see this youthful god of poetry connecting disparate thoughts purely by means of resemblances in the words expressing them—a thing in character in lighter comedy, especially of that kind in which Shakspeare de

lights, namely, the purposed display of wit, though, sometimes, too, disfiguring his graver scenes;—but more often you may see him doubling the natural connection or order of logical consequence in the thoughts by the introduction of an artificial and sought for resemblance in the words, as, for instance, in the third line of the play

And then grace us in the disgrace of death;—

this being a figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity—when in the highest degree-in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology— (at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead)—and, in lower degrees, in making the words themselves the subjects and materials of that surplus action, and for the same cause that agitates our limbs, and forces our very gestures into a tempest in states of high excitement.

The mere style of narration in Love's Labor's Lost, like that of Ægeon in the first scene of the Comedy of Errors, and of the Captain in the second scene of Macbeth, seems imitated with its defects and its beauties from Sir Philip Sidney; whose Arcadia, though not then published, was already well known in manuscript copies, and could hardly have escaped the notice and admiration of Shakspeare as the friend and client of the Earl of Southampton. The chief defect consists in the parentheses and parenthetic thoughts and descriptions, suited neither to the passion of the speaker, nor the purpose of the person to whom the information is to be given, but manifestly betraying the author himself not by way of continuous under-song, but-palpably, and so as to show themselves addressed to the general reader. However, it is not unimportant to notice how strong a presumption the diction and allusions of this play afford, that, though Shakspeare's acquirements in the dead languages might not be such as we suppose in a learned education, his habits had, nevertheless, been scholastic, and those of a student. For a young author's first work almost always bespeaks his recent pursuits, and his first observations of life are either drawn from the immediate employments of his youth, and from the characters and images most deeply impressed on his mind in the situations

in which those employments had placed him ;-or else they are fixed on such objects and occurrences in the world, as are easily connected with, and seem to bear upon, his studies and the hitherto exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters conceivable in an academic life.

I will only further remark the sweet and tempered gravity, with which Shakspeare in the end draws the only fitting moral which such a drama afforded. Here Rosaline rises up to the full height of Beatrice :—

Ros. Oft have I heard of you, my lord Biron,
Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;
Full of comparisons, and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit:

To weed this wormwood from your fruitful brain,
And therewithal, to win me, if you please,
(Without the which I am not to be won,)
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your talk shall be,
With all the fierce endeavor of your wit,

To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

Biron. To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It can not be; it is impossible;

Mirth can not move a soul in agony.

Ros. Why, that's the way to choke a gibing spirit,

Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,

Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools:

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it: then, if sickly ears,

Deaf'd with the clamors of their own dear groans,

Will hear your idle scorns, continue then,

And I will have you, and that fault withal;
But, if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.

Act v. sc. 2. In Biron's speech to the Princess:

and, therefore, like the eye,

Full of straying shapes, of habits, and of forms

Either read stray, which I prefer; or throw full back to the ceding lines

like the eye, full

Of straying shapes, &c.

In the same scene:

Biron. And what to me, my love? and what to me?
Ros. You must be purged too, your sins are rank;
You are attaint with fault and perjury:

Therefore, if you my favor mean to get,

A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest,
But seek the weary beds of people sick.

pre

There can be no doubt, indeed, about the propriety of expunging this speech of Rosaline's; it soils the very page that retains it. But I do not agree with Warburton and others in striking out the preceding line also. It is quite in Biron's character; and Rosaline not answering it immediately, Dumain takes up the question for him, and, after he and Longaville are answered, Biron, with evident propriety, says:

Studies my mistress? &c.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

Act i. sc. 1.

Her. O cross! too high to be enthrall'd to low-
Lys. Or else misgrafted, in respect of years;
Her. O spite! too old to be engag'd to young-
Lys. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends.
Her. O hell! to chuse love by another's eye!

THERE is no authority for any alteration;-but I never can help feeling how great an improvement it would be, if the two former of Hermia's exclamations were omitted;-the third and only appropriate one would then become a beauty, and most natural.

Ib. Helena's speech :—

I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight, &c.

I am convinced that Shakspeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout, but especially, and, perhaps, unpleasingly, in this broad determination of ungrateful treachery in Helena, so undisguisedly avowed to herself, and this, too, after the witty cool philosophizing that precedes. The act itself is natural, and the resolve so to act is, I fear, likewise too true a picture of the lax hold which principles have on a woman's heart, when opposed to, or even separated from, passion and inclination. For women are less hypocrites to their own minds than men are, because in general they feel less proportionate abhorrence of moral evil in and for itself, and more of its outward consequences, as detection, and loss of character than men-1 —their natures being almost wholly extroitive. Still, however just in itself, the representation of this is not poetical; we shrink from it, and can not harmonize it with the ideal.