Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/479

Rh character which in Juliet is awanting. Helena's love is cherished in secret, hut not self-consuming in silent languishment; it is patient and hopeful, strong in its own intensity, and sustained by its own fond faith. Her position in the play is shocking and degrading, and yet the beauty of the character is made to triumph over all, by its internal resources, and its genuine truth and sweetness. Perdita is the union of the pastoral and romantic with the classical and poetical, as if a dryad of the woods had turned shepherdess—a creature signalised by perfect beauty and airy elegance of demeanour, by natural loftiness of spirit and upright simplicity, or conscientiousness, which disdains all crooked and indirect means. Viola is, perhaps, a degree less elevated and ideal than Perdita, but with a touch of sentiment more profound and heart-stirring. Ophelia! so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider her too deeply:—her love, a secret which we have stolen from her, and which ought to die upon our hearts as upon her own;—a being far too soft, too good, too fair, to be cast among the briars of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life;—a character before which eloquence is mute—though Mrs. Jameson's eloquence finds for her sweet similitudes in a strain of sad dulcet music floating by us on the wings of night and silence, rather felt than heard, and in the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms, and in the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth, and in the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses. So young, that she is unaware of the nature of her own feelings, which are prematurely developed in their full force before she has strength to bear them; for love and grief together rend and shatter the frail texture of her existence, like the burning fluid poured into a crystal vase. And Miranda—so perfectly unsophisticated, so delicately refined, that she is all but ethereal; yet who, beside Ariel, that creature of elemental light and air, appears a palpable reality, a woman "breathing thoughtful breath," a woman, walking the earth in her mortal loveliness, with a heart as (rail-strung, as passion- touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom.

Hermione leads on the characters of the Affections,—queenly instance of the proverb, "Still waters run deep"—her deportment, her every word breathing a majestic sweetness, a grand and gracious simplicity, an easy, unforced, yet dignified self-possession—one whose passions are not vehement, but in whose settled mind the sources of pain or pleasure, love or resentment, are like the springs that feed the mountain lakes, impenetrable, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. Her sweet child Perdita, again—in whom conscientiousness and firmness mingle with picturesque delicacy; and Desdemona, not weak, with all her timid flexibility and soft acquiescence;—and Imogen, model unsurpassable of conjugal tenderness, marred by nothing jealous or fantastic in its devotion;—and lastly, Cordelia,—characterised by absence of all display, by sobriety of speech veiling the most profound affections, by quiet steadiness of purpose, and shrinking from all display of emotion.

It will enhance the value of Mrs. Jameson's Shaksperean criticisms, to think of what might be expected from other and "distinguished" authoresses, were they to undertake the theme. As a Scottish reviewer has suggested in the instance of the popular Mrs. Ellis (in whom, however,