bright misty lan1 from whence it care. For an instant it deluded you; let it Buffice. It s sweet to leave the world of realities >ehind you; the mind rests amidst impossibilities. We are happy when delivered from the rough chains of logic, tɔ wander amongst strange adventures, to live in sheer romance, and know that we are living there. I lo not try to deceive you, and make you believe in the world where I take fou. A man must disbelieve it in rder to enjoy it. We must give ourselves up to illusion, and feel that we are giving ourselves up to it. We must smile as we listen. We smile in The Winter's Tale, when Hermione descends from her pedestal, and when Leontes discovers his wife in the statue, having believed her to be dead. We smile in Cymbeline, when we see the lone cavern in which the young princes have lived like savage hunters. Improbability deprives emotions of their sting. The events interest or touch us without making us suffer. At the very moment when sympathy is too intense, we remind ourselves that it is all a fancy. They become like distant objects, whose distance softens their outline, and wraps them in a luminous veil of blue air. Your true comedy is an opera. We listen to sentiments without thinking too much of plot. We follow the tender or gay melodies without reflecting that they interrupt the action. We dream else where on hearing music; here I bid you dream on hearing verse.'

Then the speaker of the prologue retires, and the actors come ɔn.

As you Like it is a caprice.* Action there is none; interest barely; 'ikeli- | tood still less. And the whole is cnarming. Two cousins, princes' daug.ters, come to a forest with a court clown, Celia disguised as a shepherdess, Rosaind as a boy. They find here the old duke, Rosalind's father, who, driven out of his duchy, lives with his friends like a philosopher and a hunter. They find amorous shepherds, who with songs and prayers pursue intractable

In English, a word is wanting to express the French fantaisie used by M. Taine, in describing this scene: what in music is called a capriccio. Tennyson calls the Princess a medley, but it is ambiguous.-TR.

shepherdesses. They discover or they meet with lovers who become their husbands. Suddenly it is announced that the wicked Duke Frederick, who had usurped the crown, has just retired to a cloister, and restored the throne to the old exiled duke. Every one gets married, every one dances, every thing ends with a "rustic revelry." Whert is the pleasantness of these puerilities/ First, the fact of its being puerile; the absence of the serious is refreshing. There are no events, and there is no plot. We gently follow the easy cur rent of graceful or melancholy emo tions, which takes us away and moves us about without wearying. The place adds to the illusion and charm. It is an autumn forest, in which the sultry rays permeate the blushing oak leaves, or the half-stript ashes tremble and smile to the feeble breath of evening The lovers wander by brooks that "brawl" under antique roots. As you listen to them, you see the slim birches, whose cloak of lace grows glossy under the slant rays of the sun that giids them, and the thoughts wander down the mossy vistas in which their foot steps are not heard. What better place could be chosen for the comedy of sentiment and the play of heartfancies? Is not this a fit spot in which to listen to love-talk? Some one has seen Orlando, Rosalind's lover, in this glade; she hears it and blushes. "Alas the day! ... What did he, when thou sawest him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went hei What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? and when shalt thou see him again?" Then, with a lower voice, somewhat hesitating: "Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?" She is not yet exhausted: "Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on."* One question follows another, she closes the mouth of her friend, who is ready to answer. At every word she jests, but agitated, blushing, with a forced gayety; her bosom heaves, and her heart beats. Nevertheless she is calmer when Orlando comes; bandies words with him; sheltered under her disguise, she makes him confess that * As you Like it, iii. a.

has given him rest, delivered him from flattery, reconciled him to nature. He pities the stags which he is obliged to

hurt for food:

Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
Being native burghers of this desert city,
Should in their own confines with forked
heads

Have their round haunches gored." * Nothing sweeter than this mixture of tencer compassion, dreamy philosophy, delicate sadness, poetical complaints, and rustic songs. One of the lords sings:

"Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind

As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,

Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green
holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere

folly :

Then heigh-ho, the holly! This life is most jolly." t Amongst these lords is found a soul that suffers more, Jacques the melancholy, one of Shakspeare's best-loved characters, a transparent mask behind which we perceive the face of the poet. He is sad because he is tender; he feels the contact of things too keenly, and what leaves others indifferent, makes him weep. He does not scold, he is sad; he does not reason, he is moved; he has not the combative spirit of a reforming moralist; his soul is sick and weary of life. Impassioned imagination leads quickly to disgust. Like opium, it excites and shatters. It leads man to the loftiest philosophy, then lets him down to the whims of a child. Jacques leaves other men abruptly, and goes to the quiet nooks to be alone. He loves his sadness, and would not exchange it for joy. Meeting Orlando, he says:

"Rosalind is your love's name? Orlando. Yes, just.

Jacques. I do not like her name." § He has the fancies of a nervous woman.

*As you Like it, ii. 1. + Ibid. ii. 7. Compare Jacques with the Alceste of Molière. It is the contrast between a misanthrope through reasoning and one through 'magination.

As you Like it, iii. a.

"All the world's a stage.

And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining shoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
justice,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every
thing." t

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all

Love is still the theme: of all sentiments, is it not the greatest fancy-weaver? But love is not heard here in the charming prattle of Rosalind; it is glarng, like the season of the year. It does not brim over in slight conversations, in Epple and skipping prose; it breaks forth into big rhyming odes, dressed in magnificent metaphors, sustained by impassioned accents, such as a warm night, odorous and star-spangled, inspires in a poet and a lover. Lysander and Hermia agree to meet. "Lysander. To-morrow night when Phoebe

doth behold

Her silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass,
A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal,
Through Athens' gates have we devised to
steal.

Hermia. And in the wood, where often you and I

Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie. There my Lysander and myself shall meet."✶

We

They get lost, and fall asleep, wearied, under the trees. Puck squeezes in the youth's eyes the juice of a magic flower and changes his heart. Presently, when he awakes, he will become enamored of the first woman he sees. Meanwhile Demetrius, Hermia's rejected lover, wanders with Helena, whom he rejects, in the solitary wood. The magic flower changes him in turn: e now loves Helena. The lovers flee and pursue one another, beneath the lofty trees, in the calm night. smile at their transports, their complaints, their ecstasies, and yet we join n them. This passion is a dream, and yet it moves us. It is like those airy webs which we find at morning on the rest of the hedgerows where the dew as spread them, and whose weft sparales like a jewel-casket. Nothing can be more fragile, and nothing more graceful. The poet sports with emotions he mingles, confuses, redoubles, interweaves them; he twines and untwines these loves like the mazes of a dance, and we see the noble and tender figures pass by the verdant bushes,

* Midsummer Night Dream, i. 1.

from the ideal world in which Saak. speare conducts us. Dazzled by beau ty, they adore it, and the spectacle of their happiness, their emotion, and their tenderness, is a kind of enchantment.

Above these two couples flutters and hums the swarm of elves and fairies. They also love. Titania, their queen, has a young boy for her favorite, son of an Indian king, of whom Oberon, her husband, wishes to deprive her They quarrel, so that the elves creep for fear into the acorn cups, in the golden primroses. Oberon, by way of vengeance, touches Titania's sleeping eyes with the magic flower, and thus on waking the nimblest and most charming of the fairies finds herself enamored of a stupid blockhead with an ass's head. She kneels before him: she sets on his 'hairy temples a coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers:'

66

"And that same dew, which sometime on the buds

Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,

Stood now within the pretty floweret's eyes, Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail."

She calls round her all her fairy atten dants;

"Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;

Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mul berries;

The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise;

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping

replied with a petition for hay. What can be sadder and sweeter than this irony of Shakspeare? What raillery against love, and what tenderness for love! The sentiment is divine: its object unworthy. The heart is ravished, the eyes blind. It is a golden butterfly, fluttering in the mud; and Shakspeare, whilst painting its misery, preserves all its beauty:

Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth

head,

Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough
I drink the air before me, and return
Or ere your pulse twice beat." *

Shakspeare glides over things on as swift a wing, by leaps as sudden, with

And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!

At the return of morning, when

"The eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams," t the enchantment ceases, Titania awakes on her couch of wild thyme and drooping violets. She drives the monster away; her recollections of the night are effaced in a vague twilight: "These things seem small and undistinguish

able,

con.

and by the vehement sensibility which he finds in himself.t Go through the groups, and you will only discover in them divers forms and divers states of

the same power. Here, a herd of brutes, dotards, and gossips, made up of a mechanical imagination; further on, a company of men of wit, animated by a gay and foolish imagination; then, a charming swarm of women whom their delicate imagination raises so high, and their self-forgetting love car

"Go seek some dew drops here And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear." § Such is Shakspeare's fantasy, a slight tissue of bold inventions, of ardent passions, melancholy mockery, dazzling poetry, such as one of Titania's elves would have made. Nothing could be more like the poet's mind than these nimble genii, children of air and flame, whose flights compass the globe" in a second, who glide over the foam of the waves and skip between the atoms of the winds. Ariel flies, an invisible songster, around shipwrecked men to console them, discovers the thoughts of traitors, pursues the savage beast Caliban, spreads gorgeous visions before lovers, and does all in a lightningdash:

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie.

* Midsummer Night's Dream, iv. 1. ↑ Ibid. iii. 2. Ibid. iv. i.

§ Ibid. ii. 1.

lains, hardened by unbridled passions inspired by artistic rapture; in the cen tre a mournful train of grand characters, whose excited brain is filled with sad or criminal visions, and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness, or death. Ascend one stage, and contemplate the whole scene: the aggre gate bears the same mark as the details. The drama reproduces promiscuously uglinesses, basenesses, horrors, unclean details, profligate and ferocious manners, the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is unrestrained by deco rum; common sense, reason, and duty Comedy, led through a phantasmagia of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the unlikely, with no other connection but the caprice of an amused imagination, wantonly disjointed and roman. tic, an opera without music, a concerto of melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the super.