Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/274

 And speak, between the change of man and boy, With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps Into a manly stride."

But, when Shakspeare's smooth youngsters reassumed their characters as women, how the great poet must have been inwardly fretted with the incongruous presentation of the tone of masculinity in each passion, of the boy's smutch on the bloom of each emotion, the elbows wearing ragged holes through delicate sentiment, the scraggy shoulders and strong collar-bones working out of every tender phrase! He was forced to see a Cleopatra without "the entire and sinuous wealth of the shining shape" that held

"A soul's predominance I' the head so high and haught, except one thievish glance, From back of oblong eye, intent to count the slain."

It was Antony's Egypt without the fine malice and insinuation, stripped of the abjectness of her love which, grovelling for pardon at having wrecked her lord, makes him arrest her heart again to indemnify him for all his fortunes that had gone to pieces; as he answers to her cry for pardon,—

"Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss; Even this repays me."

Could all Shakspeare's training have infected a boy's imagination with Juliet's ardent frankness, which tipped those lines with the sparkle of first love, and launched it from the balcony into the night, to be one star the more? And what boy or man could have returned to