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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. Romeo's last speech over his bride is not like the raving of a disappointed boy: in its deep pathos, its rapturous despair, its glowing imagery, there is the very luxury of life and love. Juliet, who had drunk off the sleeping potion in a fit of frenzy, wakes calm and collected,—

I do remember well where I should be,

And there I am,-where is my Romeo?

The profound slumber in which her senses have been steeped for so many hours has tranquillized

The famous soliloquy, "Gallop apace, ye fieryfooted steeds," teems with luxuriant imagery. The fond adjuration, "Come night! come Romeo! come thou day in night!" expresses that fulness of enthusiastic admiration for her lover, which possesses her whole soul; but expresses it as only Juliet could or would have expressed it,in a bold and beautiful metaphor. Let it be re

membered, that in this speech, Juliet is not supposed to be addressing an audience, nor even a confidante. She is thinking aloud; it is the young heart" triumphing to itself in words." I confess I have been shocked at the utter want of taste and refinement in those who, with coarse derision, or in a spirit of prudery, yet more gross and perverse, have dared to comment on this beautiful " Hymn to the Night," breathed out by Juliet, in the silence and solitude of her chamber. It is at the very moment too that her whole heart and fancy are abandoned to blissful anticipation, that the Nurse enters with the news of Romeo's banishment; and the immediate transition from rapture to despair has a most powerful effect.

It is the same shaping spirit of imagination which, in the scene with the Friar, heaps together all images of horror that ever hung upon a troubled dream.

O bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower,

Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk

Where serpents are-chain me with roaring bears,

external glow, its beauty, its vigour, its freshness, and its truth.

With all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and education and the action of the drama, while it serves to develope the character, appears but its natural and necessary result. "Le mystere de l'existence," said Madame de Staël to her daughter, "c'est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos peines."

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In the character of Juliet we have seen the passionate and the imaginative blended in an equal degree, and in the highest conceivable degree as combined with delicate female nature. In Helena we have a modification of character altogether distinct; allied, indeed, to Juliet as a picture

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