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.

other faculty were passive or deficient, she might still be herself. These are the inherent qualities with which God sent us into the world: they may be perverted by a bad education--they may be obscured by harsh and evil destinies they may be overpowered by the development of some particular mental power, the predominance of some passion;—but they are never wholly crushed out of the woman's soul, while it retains those faculties which render it responsible to its Creator. Shakspeare then has shown us that these elemental feminine qualities, modesty, grace, tenderness, when expanded under genial influences, suffice to constitute a perfect and happy human creature such is Miranda. When thrown alone amid harsh and adverse destinies, and amid the trammels and corruptions of society, without energy to resist, or will to act, or strength to endure, the end must needs be desclation.

Ophelia -poor Ophelia! O far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briars of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life! What shall be said

of her? for eloquence is mute before her! Like a strain of sad sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear-like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms-like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth-like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses-such is the character of Ophelia : so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply. The love of Ophelia, which she never once confesses, is like a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own. Her sorrow asks not words but tears; and her madness has precisely the same effect that would be produced by the spectacle of real insanity, if brought before us: we feel inclined to turn away and veil our eyes in reverential pity, and too painful sympathy.

Beyond every character that Shakspeare has

considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably interesting; and yet I doubt whether any woman, who would have been capable of understanding and appreciating such a man, would have passionately loved him. Let us for a moment imagine any one of Shakspeare's most beautiful and striking female characters in immediate connexion with Hamlet; the gentle Desdemona would never have dispatched her household cares in haste, to listen to his philosophical speculations, his dark conflicts with his own spirit. Such a woman as Portia would have studied him; Juliet would have pitied him; Rosalind would have turned him over with a smile to the melancholy Jacques; Beatrice would have laughed at him outright; Isabel would have reasoned with him; Miranda could but have wondered at him: