over the whole; and her impatience, to use her own expression, is truly that of "a child before a festival, that hath new robes and may not wear them." 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,
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones:
Or bid me go into a new-made grave;

Or hide me with a dead man in his shroud ;-
Things that to hear them told, have made me tremble!

But she immediately adds,

And I will do it without fear or doubt,

To live an unstained wife to my sweet love!

In the scene where she drinks the sleeping potion, although her spirit does not quail, nor her determination falter for an instant, her vivid fancy conjures up one terrible apprehension after another, till gradually, and most naturally, in such a mind once thrown off its poise, the horror rises to frenzy-her imagination realizes its own hideous creations, and she sees her cousin Tybalt's ghost.*

*Juliet, courageously drinking off the potion, after she has placed before herself in the most fearful colors all its possible consequences, is compared by Schlegel to the famous story of Alexander and his physician.

In particular passages this luxuriance of fancy may seem to wander into excess. For instance,

O serpent heart, hid with a flowery face!

Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?

Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!

Dove feather'd ra ven! wolfish ravening lamb, &c.

Yet this highly figurative and antithetical exuberance of language is defended by Schlegel on strong and just grounds; and to me also it appears natural, however critics may argue against its taste or propriety.* The warmth and vivacity of Juliet's fancy, which plays like a light over every part of her character-which animates every line she utters-which kindles every thought into a picture, and clothes her emotions in visible images, would naturally, under strong and unusual excitement, and in the conflict of opposing sentiments, run into some extravagance of diction.t

*Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,

To dally with wrong that does no harm!
Perhaps 'tis tender, too, and pretty,

At each wild word to feel within
A sweet recoil of love and pity.

And what if in a world of sin

(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)

Such giddiness of heart and brain

Comes seldom save from rage and pain,

So talks as it's most used to do?

COLERIDGE.

These lines seem to me to form the truest comment on Juliet's wild exclamations against Romeo.

"The censure," observes Schlegel, "originates in a fanciless way of thinking, to which every thing appears unnatural that does not suit its tame insipidity. Hence an idea has been formed of sim

*

With regard to the termination of the play, which has been a subject of much critical argument, it is well known that Shakspeare, following the old English versions, has departed from the original story of Da Porta; and I am inclined to believe that Da Porta in making Juliet waken from her trance while Romeo yet lives, and in his terrible final scene between the lovers, has himself departed from the old tradition, and as a romance, has certainly improved it but that which is effective in a narrative, is not always

ple and natural pathos, which consists of exclamations destitute of imagery, and nowise elevated above every-day life; but energetic passions electrify the whole mental powers, and will, consequently, in highly-favored natures, express themselves in an ingenious and figurative manner."

"

The "Giulietta" of Luigi da Porta was written about 1520. In a popular little book published in 1565, thirty years before Shakspeare wrote his tragedy, the name of Juliet occurs as an example of faithful love, and is thus explained by a note in the margin. Juliet, a noble maiden of the citie of Verona, which loved Romeo, eldest son of the Lord Monteschi; and being privily married together, he at last poisoned himself for love of her; she, for sorrow of his death, slew herself with his dagger." This note, which furnishes in brief, the whole argument of Shakspeare's play, might possibly have made the first impression on his fancy.

In the novel of Da Porta the catastrophe is altogether different. After the death of Romeo, the friar Lorenzo endeavors to persuade Juliet to leave the fatal monument. She refuses: and throwing herself back on the dead body of her husband, she resolutely hold's her breath and dies.-"E volta ta si al giacente corpo di Romeo, il cui capo sopra un origliere, che con lei nell' arca era stato lasciato, posto aveva; gli occhi meglio rinchiusi avendogli, e di lagrime il freddo volto bagnandogli disse;" Che debbo senza di te in vita piu fare, signor mio? e che altro mi resta verso te se non colla mia morte seguirti?" E detto questo, la sua gran sciagura nell' animo recatasi, e la perdita del caro amante ricordandosi, deliberando di piu non vivere, raccolto a se il fiato, e per buono spazio tenutolo, e poscia con un gran grid o fuori mandandolo, sopra il morto corpo, morta ricadde."

calculated for the drama; and I cannot but agree with Schlegel, that Shakspeare has done well and wisely in adhering to the old story.* Can we doubt, for a moment, that he, who has given us the catastrophe of Othello, and the tempest scene in Lear, might also have adopted these additional circumstances of horror in the fate of the lovers, and have so treated them as to harrow up our very soulhad it been his object to do so? But apparently it was not. The tale is one,

Such, as once heard, in gentle heart destroys

All pain but pity.

It is in a truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. We behold the catastrophe afar off with scarcely a wish to avert it. Romeo and Juliet must die: their destiny is fulfilled: they have quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more upon this 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

There is nothing so improbable in the story of Romeo and Juliet as to make us doubt the tradition that it is a real fact. "The Veronese," says Lord Byron, in one of his letters from Verona, "are tenaceous to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden-once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Palladian structures, lies level with the earth, the very spot on which it stood will still be consecrated by the memory of Juliet.

When in Italy, I met a gentleman, who being then "dans le genre rom intique," wore a fragment of Juliet's tomb set in a ring.

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 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—

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 despairshe 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 to her is to die, and she dies. The poem, which opened with the enmity of the two families, closes