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JULIET.

O LOVE! thou teacher-O Grief! thou tamer -and Time, thou healer of human hearts!-bring hither all your deep and serious revelations -And ye too, rich fancies of unbruised, unbowed youth -ye visions of long perished hopes-shadows of unborn joys-gay colorings of the dawn of existence! whatever memory hath treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art; all soft and delicate images-all lovely forms-divinest voices and entrancing melodies— gleams of sunnier skies and fairer climes-Italian moonlights and airs that "breathe of the sweet south,"-now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination-live once more to my heart! Come, thronging around me, all inspirations that wait on passion, on power, on beauty; give me to tread, not bold, and yet unblamed, within the inmost sanctuary of Shakspeare's genius, in Juliet's moonlight bower, and Miranda's enchanted isle!

It is not without emotion, that I attempt to touch on the character of Juliet. Such beautiful things have already been said of her-only to be exceeded in beauty by the subject that inspired them!—it is impossible to say anything better; but it is possible to say something more. Such in fact is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet's character, that we are not at first aware of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense, is as if while hanging over a half-blown rose, and revelling in its intoxicating perfume, we should pull it asunder, leaflet by leaflet, the better to display its bloom and

fragrance. Yet how otherwise should we disclose the wonders of its formation, or do justice to the skill of the divine hand that hath thus fashioned it in its beauty?

Love, as a passion, forms the groundwork of the drama. Now, admitting the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the individual character and temperament, but it is under the influence of climate and circumstance. The love that is calm in one moment, shall show itself vehement and tumultuous at another. The love that is wild and passionate in the south, is deep and contemplative in the north; as the Spanish or Roman girl perhaps poisons a rival, or stabs herself for the sake of a living lover, and the German or Russian girl pines into the grave for love of the false, the absent, or the dead. Love is ardent or deep, bold or timid, jealous or confiding, impatient or humble, hopeful or desponding-and yet there are not many loves, but one love.

All Shakspeare's women, being essentially women, either love or have loved, or are capable of loving; but Juliet is love itself. The passion is her state of being, and out of it she has no existence. It is the soul within her soul; the pulse within her heart; the life-blood along her veins, "blending with every atom of her frame." The love that is so chaste and dignified in Portia-so airy-delicate and fearless in Miranda-so sweetly confiding in Perdita-so playfully fond in Rosalind-so constant in Imogen-so devoted in Desdemona -so fervent in Helen-so tender in Viola,-is each and all of these in Juliet. All these remind us of her; but she reminds us of nothing but her own sweet self; or if she does, it is of the Gismunda, or the Lisetta, or the Fiammetta of Boccaccio, to whom she is allied, not in the character or circumstances, but in the truly Italian spirit the glowing, national complexion of the portrait.*

* Lord Byron remarked of the Italian women (and he could speak avec connaissance de fait), that they are the only women in the world capable of impressions, at once very sudden and very durable; which, he adds, is to be found in no other nation. Mr. Moore observes afterwards, how completely an Italian woman, either from nature or her social position, is led to invert the usual course of frailty among ourselves, and, weak

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There was an Italian painter who said that the secret of all effect in color consisted in white upon black, and black upon white. How perfectly did Shakspeare understand this secret of effect! and how beautifully he has exemplified it in Juliet!

So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,

As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows!

Thus she and her lover are in contrast with all around them. They are all love, surrounded with all hate; all harmony, surrounded with all discord: all pure nature, in the midst of polished and artificial life. Juliet, like Portia, is the foster child of opulence and splendor; she dwells in a fair city-she has been nurtured in a palace --she clasps her robe with jewels--she braids her hair with rainbowtinted pearls; but in herself she has no more connection with the trappings around her, than the lovely exotic, transplanted from some Eden-like climate, has with the carved and gilded conservatory which has reared and sheltered its luxuriant beauty.

But in this vivid impression of contrast, there is nothing abrupt or harsh. A tissue of beautiful poetry weaves together the principal figures, and the subordinate personages. The consistent truth of the costume, and the exquisite gradations of relief with which the most opposite hues are approximated, blend all into harmony. Romeo and Juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic back-ground; nor are they, like Thekla and Max in the Wallenstein, two angels of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects of humanity; but every circumstance, and every personage, and every shade of character in each, tends to the development of the sentiment which is the subject of the drama. The poetry, too, the richest that can possibly be conceived, is interfused through all the characters; the splendid imagery lavished upon all with the careless prodigality of genius; and the whole is lighted up into such

in resisting the first impulses of passion, to reserve the whole strength of her character for a display of constancy and devotedness afterwards. -Both these traits of national character are exemplified in Juliet.-Moore's Life of Byron, vol. ii. pp. 303, 339. 4to. edit.

a sunny brilliance of effect, as though Shakspeare had really transported himself into Italy, and had drunk to intoxication of her genial atmosphere. How truly it has been said, that "although Romeo and Juliet are in love, they are not love-sick!" What a false idea would anything of the mere whining amoroso give us of Romeo, such as he really is in Shakspeare-the noble, gallant, ardent, brave, and witty! And Juliet-with even less truth could the phrase or idea apply to her! The picture in "Twelfth Night" of the wan girl dying of love, "who pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy," would never surely occur to us, when thinking on the enamored and impassioned Juliet, in whose bosom love keeps a fiery vigil, kindling tenderness into enthusiasm, enthusiasm into passion, passion into heroism! No, the whole sentiment of the play is of a far different cast. It is flushed with the genial spirit of the south: it tastes of youth, and of the essence of youth; of life, and of the very sap of life.* the struggle of love against evil destinies, and a thorny world; the pain, the grief, the anguish, the terror, the despair; the aching adieu; the pang unutterable of parted affection; and rapture, truth, and tenderness trampled into an early grave: but still an Elysian grace lingers round the whole, and the blue sky of Italy bends over all!

We have indeed

In the delineation of that sentiment which forms the groundwork of the drama, nothing in fact can equal the power of the picture, but ts inexpressible sweetness and its perfect grace: the passion which nas taken possession of Juliet's soul, has the force, the rapidity, the resistless violence of the torrent: but she herself as "moving delicate," as fair, as soft, as flexible as the willow that bends over it, whose light leaves tremble even with the motion of the current which hurries beneath them. But at the same time that the pervading sentiment is never lost sight of, and is one and the same throughout, the individual part of the character in all its variety is developed, and marked with the nicest discrimination. For instance, -the simplicity of Juliet is very different from the simplicity of Miranda her innocence is not the innocence of a desert island.

*La sève de la vie, is an expression used somewhere by Madame de Staël.

The energy she displays does not once remind us of the moral grandeur of Isabel, or the intellectual power of Portia ;-it is founded in the strength of passion, not in the strength of character: -it is accidental rather than inherent, rising with the tide of feeling or temper, and with it subsiding. Her romance is not the pastoral romance of Perdita, nor the fanciful romance of Viola; it is the romance of a tender heart and a poetical imagination. Her inexperience is not ignorance: she has heard that there is such a thing as falsehood, though she can scarcely conceive it. Her mother and her nurse have perhaps warned her against flattering vows and man's inconstancy; or she has even

-Turned the tale by Ariosto told,

Of fair Olympia, loved and left, of old!

Hence that bashful doubt, dispelled almost as soon as felt—

Ah, gentle Romeo!

If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.

That conscious shrinking from her own confession

Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny
What I have spoke !

The ingenuous simplicity of her avowal

Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won,
I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay,

So thou wilt woo-but else, not for the world!

In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou may'st think my 'havior light,

But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true

Than those who have more cunning to be strange.

And the proud yet timid delicacy, with which she throws herself for forbearance and pardon upon the tenderness of him she loves, even for the love she bears him

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