Calaf (after a pause.) Thou! Thou wouldst prevent my death! Is this thy pity? Wouldst thou have me live A loveless, lifeless, comfortless existence? Think'st thou thy charms even can control despair? Here ends thy power. Kill me thou mayst-thou canst not Compel me to live on. Off-let me die; And if a spark of pity still survive, Reserve it for my father-he is here In Pekin-he hath need of comfort, since The staff of his old age is gone, since fate Bereaves him of his dear and only son. [Again attempts to stab himself. Carry them news of comfort, freedom, joy. Adelma. It is time to die, Since hope is at an end. Calaf. Gods, do I dream? Turandot. I will not shine in borrow'd glories, Prince, But not alone that justice asks it,-not Adelma. O martyrdom beyond compare ! Calaf (who has stood during all this time as if in a dream, now appears for the first time to come to himself, and clasps the Princess with ecstasy in his arms.) Thou-mine! Let me not die with this excess of bliss. Altoum. The blessing of the gods be with thee, daughter, Since thou at last bringst comfort to my age. Pantalon. Adelma. Live, then, hard-hearted man; live happy with her, [To Turandot. Whom from my inmost soul I hate. Yes, know To fly to happier lands. This very night, To make him fly with me. It would not be. 2 c VOL. XXXIII. NO. CCV. I did betray, in hope that, banish'd from thee, [She lifts the dagger, which TURANDOT had wrested from Calaf (clasping her by the arm.) Adelma, O be calm! Calaf. Thou shalt not die. 'Tis to thy fortunate Turandot. I, too, father, Unite my prayers with his. I must appear And now, we ask our readers, of whom we suppose one in every two hundred may perhaps have heard of Gozzi's name, whether the Venetian be not a man of imagination and talent; whether the drama from which we have quoted so liberally, and others not inferior to it, be not animated by a dramatic interest, and a poetical spirit, more analogous to the freedom and force of our own dramatists, than to the colder character of the continental stage? Has he not contrived to impart to the fantastic character of Oriental fable, the earnestness, the deep feeling, the reality of the poetry of the West, "And wonders wild of Arabesque combined With Gothic imagery of darker shade ?" For our own part, we cannot hesitate to say, that though we do not look upon his works as characteristic of the Italian mind, but rather as indicating a genius, inferior, no doubt, in degree, but the same in kind with that of our own English dramatists of the days of Elizabeth, we have always thought that in these almost forgotten dramas, instinct as they are with poetical fire, abounding in natural and forcible dialogue, adorned with the richest and most varied colouring of imagination, passing so gracefully from the tragic to the comic, and, above all, carrying along with them the sympathy and interest of the readers, amidst all their wanderings beyond the visible diurnal sphere, the Italians might have found perhaps a better model of dramatic art, than in the monotonous beauty of Metastasio's operas, with his allpervading principle of pastoral love, with his machinery of suspended daggers and indispensable confidantes, who knew every thing before; or in the sententious pomp and meagre abstractions of that man of one idea, and that too, that least susceptible of dramatic variety, Victor Alfieri. CHARACTERISTICS OF WOMEN.* CHARACTERS OF PASSION AND IMAGINATION. WHAT is Passion? The art and act of suffering. What is Imagination? The art and act of creating. The two together? Poetry, dealing with mortal pleasure and pain, and thereby subliming even while it saddens, beautifying even while it troubles life and death. Dwell they in more imperial power in man's or woman's heart? We who are every inch a man, say in woman's-you who are every inch a woman, say in man's. Brightly burn they both in both, when fair bosom meets bold, and saints or sinners feel "That Love is heaven, and heaven is Love." Characters of Passion and Imagination! Where dwell they now-adays in this world? In madhouses. The people without keepers, in this intellectual age, acknowledge not their dominion. They are all good and loyal subjects of Common Sense. He is "monarch of all he surveys." Blood-heat is now reduced to the temperature of milk and water in a dairy at peep of dawn; and not a pulse in male or female wrist beats more than sixty to the minute. That strange sensation which is even yet sometimes felt, called fluttering at the heart, is so called by an elegant misnomer. 'Tis but flatulence or acridity in the stomach. Indurated is the white and eke the brown matter of the brain; and dulness dwells in the deception of a grand developement. "They that look out at the windows are darkened." Dim is the Palace of the Soul. Pia mater has lost all sense of religion. Sin herself has grown stupid, though she sprung from the head of Satan; and Virtue looks as if she were her twin-sister, she who of yore was a seraph, and drew her descent from heaven. sky. But now nobody is young except the old. "There are young women in these days," says the Lady to whose delightful book about Shakspeare we return, " but there is no such thing as youth-the bloom of existence is sacrificed to a fashionable education, and where we should find the rose-buds of the spring, we see only the full-blown, flaunting, precocious roses of the hot-bed." If we ever marry, it shall be an old woman-a woman who, whether fat and fair or not, shall at least be forty. Not a "full-blown, flaunting, precocious rose of the hot-bed," but an ever-blooming, modest Christmas rose, that meets you at the door with a snowy shower of blossoms. Canker worse than the smut in wheat soon eats away the one, if frost not blights it till it wither; the heart of the other is sound as its leaves are smiling, even like the tree that flowers but in heaven, immortal amaranth. The world is in a bad way. Youth used to be clothed, as with a garment, with genius and innocence, and walked the earth in joy, unconscious of its own glory, as stars walk the Yet one sometimes picks up on the streets Sybilline leaves, scribbled with warnings for the youth of this enlightened age, against the dangers of romance. They may as well be bid go armed against the Griffin and the Arimaspin. The days of chivalry are not gone, for when hay is at eightpence a-stone, every Cockney keeps his 'oss; but the age of romance is gone, we understand, even among milliners, who have betaken themselves to useful and entertaining knowledge. "Where are they," Mrs Jameson asks, "these disciples of poetry and romance-these victims of disinterested devotion and believing truth-all conscience and tenderness-whom it is so necessary to guard against too much confidence in others, and too little in themselves-where are they?" And the celebrated echo, Paddy Blake, answers, "Nowhere!" Romance of old had, what Coleridge so finely calls her "Cloudland gorgeous land" hovering at sun Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical; with fifty vignette etchings. By Mrs Jameson, In two volumes. London: Saunders and Otley. rise or sunset-nay, all day long over Clod-land till the grass grew greener in the emerald light, or the violet more "deeply, darkly, beautifully blue" in the cerulean smile that tinged earth with heaven. Dissolved is all that sweet or solemn pageantry-and the lovely feminine adorers of poetry and romance, are only to be found now "wandering in the Elysian fields, with the romantic young gentlemen, who are too generous, too zealous in defence of innocence, too enthusiastic in the admiration of virtue, too violent in the hatred of vice, too sincere in friendship, too faithful in love, too active and disinterested in the cause of truth!" The favourite philosophy of the day is-utility-alias expediencyalias selfishness-alias what-youmay. And all the evils of that heartless creed are encouraged and increased by the forcing system of Education-a system which, our fair friend (if she will permit us to call her so) indignantly says, "inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls, trained by knowing mothers and all-accomplished governesses, with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection, (in other words, of romance,) 'frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore;' with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles; with whom opinion-the same false honour which sends men out to fight duels-stands instead of strength and the light of virtue within their own souls. Hence the strange anomalies of artificial society-girls of sixteen, who are models of manner, miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the Juliets and Imogens; and matrons of forty, who, when the passions should be tame and wait upon the judgment, amaze the world, and put us to confusion with their doings." Laugh at the Juliets and Imogens! They will laugh next at Mary Mag dalene. like Ophelias "sewing in their closets." Most of them are readers of Maga; and we never write such an article as this without the happiness of knowing, that in many a secret place the pages will be illumined by "Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven," Yet think not that, after all, we disbelieve in the existence of many maids and matrons, as fair and good even as the ladies Shakspeare saw in his dramatic dreams. "Millions of spiritual creatures walk," not "unseen" in shade and sunshine, or sit as Romeo calls the eyes of his Juliet. Come, then,-we exclaim in the beautiful language of the work before us-" O Love! thou TeacherO Grief! thou tamer-O Time! thou healer of human hearts! bring hither all your deep and serious revelations. And ye, too, rich fancies of unbrui. sed, unbowed youth-ye visions of long-perished hopes-shadows of unborn joys-gay colourings of the dawn of existence-whatever memory hath treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art—all soft and delicate images-all lovely forms divinest voices, and entrancing melodies-gleams of sunnier skies and fairer climes-Italian moonlights, and airs that breathe of the sweet south' now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination-live once more to my heart. Come, thronging around me, all inspirations that wait on passion, on power, on beauty; give me to tread, not bold, and yet unblamed, within the inmost sanctuary of Shakspeare's genius, in Juliet's Moonlight Bower, and Miranda's Enchanted Isle." We see Juliet but for a very short time before her first meeting with Romeo at the masquerade, and she speaks but a very few words; of Romeo we see and hear much, and we have begun to regard him with kindness and admiration. HE IS IN LOVE! He knows not yet of Juliet's existence, or if he does, he has either never beheld the fair child, or her beauty has glided by, over the surface of his eyes, without having sunk into his heart. Does not that often happen? Affection gazes on its object in the hour of fate, and thenceforth breathes and burns but for it alone in a changed world. As yet Juliet has no lover but the County Paris. And he, though a fond lover, and a proper man, is nothing to her unawakened bosom. He looks joyfully forward to the masquerade, for sake of Juliet, Romeo for sake of Rosaline. Capulet wishes Paris to wed Ju liet; but reminds him that "she is yet a stranger to the world," and "hath not seen the change of fourteen years." "Let two more summers wither in their Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride. mothers made." Meanwhile Romeo has been conversing with Benvolio about his own love for Rosaline, and we already see in him, though his speech be "high fantastical," the noble, gallant, brave, and witty. The Maskers are not yet assembled; and we get a glimpse of her whom her father calls "the hopeful lady of my earth.” The fair child, called by her nurse, answers to the name of "Lamb! Lady-bird!" and, like a child, asks, "How now, who calls? "I'll look to like, if looking liking move; Nurse. Then ensues that famous harangue of the old nurse, of which the coarseness would be insufferably disgusting, were it not so curiously characteristic; and did it not serve to shew, by contrast, the purity of the crea ture, of whose infancy the not unaffectionate hag keeps so tediously prosing away about a most senseless and nurselike anecdote. "Wilt thou not, Jule? It stinted, and said-Ay. Juliet. And stint thou, too, I pray thee, nurse, say I." Mrs Jameson alludes, in a few well chosen words, to the unobtrusive simplicity of Juliet's first appearance, the quiet manner in which she steals upon us, as the serene graceful girl, her feelings as yet unawaken'd, and her energies all unknown to herself, and unsuspected by others-and to the delightful charm of her silence and filial deference to her mother. Alas! in a few hours, rather than that Romeo were banished, the same creature almost impiously wishes that both her parents were dead! But the scene shifts-and Juliet doubtless lovelily arrayed, and not attended too closely now by nurse and mother, is shining starlike at her first masquerade. She has not yet come out-but her beauty glorifies the halls of her father's house, and Romeo is struck through the heart by an eyeshot wound. We imagine Juliet, since her mother suffers it, suffering it too; and yet neither heeding nor hearing the meaning of the no doubt often repeated narrative-or if she do hear and understand, " to the pure all things are pure;" and she stops the mouth of the beldame with perfect good-humour, letting us feel at once that no harm had been done to the delicacy and innocence of her nature by all that had ever fallen from the coarse lips of a vulgar domestic. And to her lady-mother's question how simple the reply! "La. Cap. Tell me, daughter Juliet, How stands your disposition to be married? Jul. It is an honour that I dream not Love at first sight! And the more natural-think you-on the part of Juliet or of Romeo? Why, Romeo was in love with Rosaline. But Rosaline was cold as moonlight on snowJuliet is warm as sunlight on roses. "She whom I love now, Doth grace for grace, and love for love allow; Most natural, therefore, was it for Romeo to forget the Dian who would "not be hit with Cupid's arrow," and bury his whole being for ever in the bosom of that "snowy dove." And though in his first fit of empassioned wonder, he calls her "beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear," and soon afterwards fears "to profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine," yet while "kissing her," he feels that her lips are not" too rich for use," and that they have sent a stream of unextinguishable fire into his life. Lady Capulet then draws a flattering picture of Paris, and Juliet artlessly says, As for Juliet, an hour gone, when asked "how stands your disposition to be married," she answered with perfect truth," it is an honour that I dream not of;" but now she sees her husband in Romeo, and so changed is her whole being in a moment, that "If he be married, My grave is like to be my wedding-bed!" And intenser is her love in its "pro""that she must love digious birth," |