Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/283

 which Shakspeare has described. As all the instruments of an orchestra are tuned upon a single pitch, and as all future modifications of the instruments must defer to the same if they mean to take rank in harmony, so all the women who are still possible to Nature must accord with her influential note. Shakspeare is content to strike that. Through all the chords which cluster around his different characters, we detect it: he seems to be making tuning-forks on the same pitch, but of various materials, to emphasize it to the ear. His plays take from it a consonant vibration that extends through scenes and lapses of time during which no woman's face appears. The tonic of her heart is diffused beyond the limits of her person; as when Ophelia's bloom clings to the fate of Hamlet, even while she waits in death for him to reach her funeral-rite. So the beautiful soul of Cordelia, that is little talked of by herself, and is but stingily set forth by circumstance, engrosses our feeling in scenes from whose threshold her filial piety is banished. We know what Lear is so pathetically remembering: the sisters tell us in their cruellest moments; it mingles with the midnight storm, a sigh of the daughterhood that was repulsed. In the pining of the Fool we detect it. Through every wail or gust of this awful symphony of madness, ingratitude, and irony, we feel a woman's breath.

Since Shakspeare's day, new countries have been discovered and peopled; new colonies have carried his mother-tongue around the earth; the language of woman, like the girdle of a goddess, is a zone drawn round all