Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/291

 spring day, for it is too impatient to levy on the lagging warmth of summer; and the sudden heat sends every drop of Juliet's blood rushing into the frankest words that maiden ever spoke. She has not even mental device enough to hush what the most passionate women, of a type less frigid than our own, are quite content to feel if there's love enough to justify. So the verses which come fluent from Juliet's lips do not scald like the insinuations of some modern novels which plot random passions and ingeniously dally with them. Shakspeare has no pages of this elaborate suggestion. His mental style was like the archer's bolt that quivers in the middle of the boss: he never could have learned this modern practice of the boomerang, which dips, skims, makes ricochets, lingers, doubles corners, and plays back into the sender's hand.

"A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon Than love that would seem hid: love's night is noon."

The finest of his ladies cry out with the sudden smart.

"Cæsario, by the roses of the spring, By maidhood, honor, truth, and every thing, I love thee so, that, maugre all my pride, Nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide."

Perhaps this is not a style that might be safely cultivated in our female boarding-schools, unless all the Cæsarios were Violas in disguise. But it is Love's ideal sincerity as it lives in Poesy's world to quicken sluggards and scorch prurience to death.

His love is not only unsophisticated: it is as virile, sumptuous, adventurous, intense, as the age which