Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/292

 crushed the Armada as if it were a cluster to infuse new blood into England. It shares the intrepidity of all the sea-kings, but declines their ruffling and bluster. It is colored like the costumes of the nobles, who vaunted their rich stuffs and set the dull streets aglow like a parterre of flowers, before we began to exchange doublets and slashed satin for the hypocritic pantaloon. Its manner is free, reliant, full of respect and of a proudness of honor: sometimes it lets the flashing blade be seen at a touch of the ruffled wrist; sometimes it subdues all the grand state into deference, cap in hand, till the plumes sweep the ground clean before the beloved object. It has been reared in Anglo-Saxon bluntness. It is as broad and light-pervaded as a forenoon; but sometimes it is like those forenoons which appear to have saved over afternoon shades from yesterdays, they are so toned with the pearliness of a refraining light. It has risen early, and its elastic steps brush dew, and its freshly opened eyes are dawns. We seem to have returned with these lovers to a long-past epoch of the world, when Love had been just invented and put on trial among men and women of heroic mould and simple manners, who let the new passion flood them to the brim of their brains and turn every sense into its heralds. They report something so antique as to be young; and our jaded nerves respond to the tonic of a feeling that is for the first time tried. So deeply does Shakspeare's genius dip the heart into the old stream that makes invulnerable and immortal.

He sets forth the passion as it defies races, passes