Page:A study of Shakespeare (IA cu31924013158393).pdf/202

 we need not Antony's example to show us that these are less than straws in the balance.

Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient à la fois Il hésita, lâchant le monde dans son choix.

Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has Shakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom "Phœbus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to whom at the very last

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, That hurts, and is desired.

To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand might have boasted