nel 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 her nerves, and stilled the fever in her blood; she wakes "like a sweet child who has been dreaming of something promised to it by its mother," and opens her eyes to ask for it—

Where is my Romeo?

she is answered at once,

Thy husband in thy bosom here lies dead.

This is enough: she sees at once the whole horror of her situation-she sees it with a quiet and resolved despair-she utters no reproach against the Friar-makes no inquiries, no complaints, except that affecting remonstrance

O churl-drink all, and leave no friendly drop
To help me after !

All that is left her is to die, and she dies. The poem, which opened with the enmity of the two families, closes 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 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 from all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its 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 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 Helen is the union of strength of passion with strength of character.

"To be tremblingly alive to 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, al

1 Foster's Essays.