But when once he has beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxi cating draughts of hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade before the soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round his heart burns to that heart's very core. We no longer find him adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of his gay companions: he is no longer "for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in ;" but all is consecrated, earnest, rapturous, in the feeling and the expression.

His first passion is indulged as a waking dream, a reverie of the fancy; it is depressing, indolent, fantastic; his second elevates him to the third heaven, or hurries him to despair. It rushes to its object through all impediments, defies all dangers, and seeks at last a triumphant grave, in the arms of her he so loved. Thus Romeo's previous attachment to Rosaline is so contrived as to exhibit to us another variety in that passion which is the subject of the poem, by showing us the distinction between the fancied and the real sentiment. It adds a deeper effect to the beauty of Juliet; it interests us in the commencement for the tender and romantic Romeo; and gives an individual reality to his character by stamping him, like an historical as well as a dramatic portrait, with the very spirit of the age in which he lived. . . .

In the extreme vivacity of her imagination, and its influence upon the action, the language, the sentiments of the drama, Juliet resembles Portia ; but with this striking differIn Portia, the imaginative power, though developed in a high degree, is so equally blended with the other intellectual and moral faculties, that it does not give us the idea of excess. It is subject to her nobler reason; it adorns

ence.

Of pretty fond adoptious Christendoms

That blinking Cupid gossips."

The courtly poets of Elizabeth's time, who copied the Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, are full of these quaint conceits.

and heightens all her feelings; it does not overwhelm or mislead them. In Juliet, it is rather a part of her Southern temperament, controlling and modifying the rest of her character; springing from her sensibility, hurried along by her passions, animating her joys, darkening her sorrows, exaggerating her terrors, and, in the end, overpowering her reason. With Juliet, imagination is, in the first instance, if not the source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her imagination. It is through the power of imagination that the eloquence of Juliet is so vividly poetical; that every feeling, every sentiment, comes to her clothed in the richest imagery, and is thus reflected from her mind to ours. The poetry is not here the mere adornment, the outward garnishing of the character; but its result, or rather blended with its essence. It is indivisible from it, and interfused through it like moonlight through the summer air. . . . With regard to the termination of the play, which has been a subject of much critical argument, it is well known that Shakspeare, following the old English versions, has departed from the original story of Da Porta ;* and I am inclined to believe that Da Porta, in making Juliet waken from her trance while Romeo yet lives, and in his terrible final scene between the lovers, has himself departed from the old tradition, and, as a romance, has certainly improved it; but that which is effective in a narrative is not always calculated for the drama; and I cannot but agree with Schlegel, that Shakspeare has done well and wisely in adhering to the old story. .

It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. We behold the catastrophe afar off with scarcely a

* In the novel of Da Porta the catastrophe is altogether different. After the death of Romeo, the Friar Lorenzo endeavors to persuade Juliet to leave the fatal monument. She refuses; and throwing herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely holds her breath and dies.

I wish to avert it. Romeo and Juliet must die; their destiny is fulfilled; they have quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more upon this earth? Young, innocent, loving and beloved, they descend together into the tomb; but Shakspeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts, not a dark charnel vault haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. Romeo and Juliet are pictured lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not oppress us with that suffocating sense of horror which in the altered tragedy makes the fall of the curtain a relief, but all pain is lost in the tenderness and poetic beauty of the picture.

[From Philarète Chasles's “Études sur Shakespeare."*]

Who cannot recall lovely summer nights when the forces of nature seem ripe for development and yet sunk in drowsy languor-intense heat mingled with exuberant vigour, fervid force, and silent freshness?

The nightingale's song comes from the depths of the grove. The flower-cups are half closed. A pale lustre illumines the foliage of the forest and the outline of the hills. This profound repose conceals, we feel, a fertile force; beneath the retiring melancholy of nature lies hidden burning emotion. Beneath the pallor and coolness of night we divine restrained ardours; each flower brooding in silence is longing to bloom forth.

Such is the peculiar atmosphere with which Shakespeare

* As quoted by F., p. 141, with a few verbal changes. For another translation of a part of the same passage, see Dowden's Shakspere, p. 101. Dowden remarks: "The external atmosphere of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, its Italian colour and warmth, have been so finely felt by M. Philarète Chasles that his words deserve to be a portion of every criticism of that play."

has enveloped one of his most wonderful creations, Romeo and Juliet.

Not only the story upon which the drama is founded, but the very form of the language comes from the South. Italy was the inventor of the tale; it breathes the very spirit of her national records, her old family feuds, the amorous and bloody intrigues which fill her annals. No one can fail to recognize Italy in its lyric rhythm, its blindness of passion, its blossoming and abundant vitality, in its brilliant imagery, its bold composition. Romeo's words flow like one of Petrarch's sonnets, with a like delicate choice, a like antithesis, a like grace, and a like delight in clothing his passion in tender allegory. Juliet, too, is wholly Italian; with small gift of forethought, and absolutely ingenuous in her abandon, she is at once passionate and pure. . . .

...

With Friar Laurence, we foresee that the lovers will be conquered by fate; Shakespeare does not close the tomb upon them until he has intoxicated them with all the happiness that can be crowded into human existence. The balcony scene is the last gleam of this fleeting bliss. Heavenly accents float upon the air, the fragrance of the pomegranate blossoms is wafted aloft to Juliet's chamber, the sighing plaint of the nightingale pierces the leafy shadows of the grove; nature, dumb and impassioned, can only in rustling and fragrance add her assent to that sublime, sad hymn upon the frailty of human happiness. . . .

In a deserted street of deserted Verona stands, half hidden, an old smoke-stained hostelry, where there is shouting, and swearing, and smoking, where macaroni and sour wine are dealt out to labourers. It was once the palace of the Capulets. The little hat sculptured above the door-way is the escutcheon of the Capulets, the cappelletto. Here Juliet lived. At the end of a court-yard there is an ancient tomb, the burial-place, they tell you, of Romeo and Juliet. It looks now like an empty horse-trough. Every year thousands of

curious people come on a pilgrimage hither to see this fragment of stone.

It is due to Shakespeare that the traveller now visits Verona solely to look for traces of Romeo and Juliet.*

[From Maginn's "Shakespeare Papers."+]

I consider Romeo designed to represent the character of an unlucky man-- a man, who, with the best views and fairest intentions, is perpetually so unfortunate as to fail in every aspiration, and, while exerting himself to the utmost in their behalf, to involve all whom he holds dearest in misery and ruin. Had any other passion or pursuit occupied Romeo, he would have been equally unlucky as in his love. Illfortune has marked him for her own. From beginning to

* "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and des-. olate conventual garden-once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love."

Since Byron's day the tomb has been removed to the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, where it is still shown to tourists for a fee of 25 centesimi (5 cents in our money). Howells (Italian Journeys, p. 307) asks: “Does not the fact that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?"

The same writer thus refers to the House of the Capulets: "We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family, anciently one of the principal in Verona, has fallen from much of its former greatness. . . . There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing about in the court; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both in a small way.' † Shakespeare Papers, by William Maginn (London, 1860), quoted by F. p. 427.