with their reconciliation over the breathless remains of their children; and no violent, frightful, or discordant feeling, is suffered to mingle with that soft impression of melancholy left within the heart, and which Schlegel compares to one long, endless sigh.

“A youthful passion," says Goëthe, (alluding to one of his own early attachments,) "which is conceived and cherished without any certain object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell, for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls-it bursts-consuming and destroying all around even as it itself expires."

To conclude: love, considered under its poetical aspect, is the union of passion and imagination; and accordingly to one of these, or to both, all the qualities of Juliet's mind and heart, (unfolding and varying as the action of the drama proceeds,) may be finally traced; the former concentrating all those natural impulses, fervent affections, and high energies, which lend the character its internal charm, its moral power, and individual interest; the latter diverging into all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external glow, its beauty, its vigor, 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 mystère de l'existence," said Madame de Staël to her daughter, "c'est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos peines,"

HELENA.

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 of fervent, enthusiastic, self-forgetting love, but differing wholly from her in other respects; for Helena is the union of strength of passion with strength of character.

"To be tremblingly alive to the gentle impressions, and yet be able to preserve, when the prosecution of a design. requires it, an immoveable heart amidst even the most imperious causes of subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution of mind; but it is the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity."* Such a character, almost as difficult to delineate in fiction as to find in real life, has Shakspeare given us in Helena, touched with the most soulsubduing pathos, and developed with the most consummate skill.

Helena, as a woman, is more passionate than imaginative; and as a character, she bears the same relation to Juliet that Isabel bears to Portia. There is equal unity of purpose and effect, with much less of the glow of imagery and the external coloring of poetry in the sentiments, language, and details. It is passion developed under its most profound and serious aspect; as in Isabella, we have the serious and the thoughtful, not the brilliant side of intellect. Both Helena and Isabel are distinguished by high mental powers, tinged with a melancholy sweetness; but in Isabel, the serious and energetic part of the character is founded in religious principle; in Helena it is founded in deep passion.

*Foster's Essays.

There never was, perhaps, a more beautiful picture of a woman's love, cherished in secret, not self-consuming in Silent languishment-not pining in thought-not passive and " desponding over its idol"—but patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith. The passion here reposes upon itself for all its interest; it derives nothing from art or ornament or circumstance; it has nothing of the picturesque charm, or glowing romance of Juliet; nothing of the poetical splendor of Portia, or the vestal grandeur of Isabel. The situation of Helena is the most painful and degrading in which a woman can be placed. She is poor and lowly; she loves a man who is far her superior in rank, who repays her love with indifference, and rejects her hand with scorn. She marries him against his will; he leaves her with contumely on the day of their marriage, and makes his return to her arms depend on conditions apparently impossible. All the circumstances and details with which Helena is surrounded, are shocking to our feelings and wounding to our delicacy and yet the beauty of the character is made to triumph over all: and Shakspeare, resting for all his effect on its internal resources. and its genuine truth and sweetness, has not even availed himself of some extraneous advantages with which Helena is represented in the original story. She is the Giletta di Narbonna of Boccaccio. In the Italian tale, Giletta is the daughter of a celebrated physician attached to the court of Roussillon; she is represented as a rich heiress, who rejects many suitors of worth and rank, in consequence of her secret attachment to the young Bertram de Roussillon.

* I have read somewhere, that the play of which Helena is the heroine, (All's Well that Ends Well,) was at first entitled by Shakspeare "Love's Labor won." Why the title was altered, or by whom, I cannot discover.

She cures the King of France of a grievous distemper by one of her father's prescriptions; and she asks and receives as her reward the young Count of Roussillon as her wedded husband. He forsakes her on their wedding day, and she retires by his order, to his territory of Roussillon. There she is received with honor, takes state upon her in her husband's absence "as the lady of the land," administers justice, and rules her lord's dominions so wisely and so well, that she is universally loved and reverenced by his subjects. In the mean time, the count, instead of rejoining her, flies to Tuscany, and the rest of the story is closely followed in the drama. The beauty, wisdom, and royal demeanor of Giletta, are charmingly described, as well as her fervent love for Bertram. But Helena, in the play, derives no dignity or interest from place or circumstance, and rests for all our sympathy and respect solely upon the truth and intensity of her affections. She is indeed represented to us as one

Whose beauty did astonish the survey

Of richest eyes; whose words all ears took captive;
Whose dear perfection, hearts that scorn'd to serve,
Humbly called mistress.

If

As her dignity is derived from mental power, without any alloy of pride, so her humility has a peculiar grace. she feels and repines over her lowly birth, it is merely as an obstacle which separates her from the man she loves. She is more sensible to his greatness than her own littleness she is continually looking from herself up to him, not from him down to herself. She has been bred up under the same roof with him; she has adored him from infancy. Her love is not "th' infection taken in at the eyes," nor kindled by youthful romance: it appears to have taken root in her being; to have grown with her years;

and to have gradually absorbed all her thoughts and faculties, until her fancy "carries no favor in it but Bertram's," and "there is no living, none, if Bertram be away."

It may be said that Bertram, arrogant, wayward, and heartless, does not justify this ardent and deep devotion. But Helena does not behold him with our eyes; but as he is "sanctified in her idolatrous fancy." Dr. Johnson says he cannot reconcile himself to a man who marries Helena like a coward, and leaves her like a profligate. This is much too severe; in the first place, there is no necessity that we should reconcile ourselves to him. In this consists a part of the wonderful beauty of the character of Helena a part of its womanly truth, which Johnson, who accuses Bertram, and those who so plausibly defend him, did not understand. If it never happened in real life, that a woman, richly endued with heaven's best gifts loved with all her heart, and soul, and strength, a man unequal to, or unworthy of her, and to whose faults herself alone was blind-I would give up the point; but if it be in nature, why should it not be in Shakspeare? We are not to look into Bertram's character for the spring and source of Helena's love for him, but into her own. She loves Bertram, -because she loves him!· -a woman's reason,-but here, and sometimes elsewhere, all sufficient.*

And although Helena tells herself that she loves in vain, a conviction stronger than reason tells her that she does not; her love is like a religion, pure, holy and deep; the blessedness to which she has lifted her thoughts is for ever before her, to despair would be a crime-it would be to cast herself away and die. The faith of her affection, combining with the natural energy of her character,

Lucellia-I have no other but a woman's reason,

I think him so, because I think him so!

Two Gentlemen of Verona.