Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/295

 be words almost as depressing as the ills which the flesh of the modern woman is heiress to; but that legacy cannot be traced as far back as the poetry of that age when the Queen rode along the line of her English soldiers at Tilbury Fort, while Dorcas and Mopsa helped to stack barley to malt the ale for her maids of honor. I doubt if Shakspeare was familiar with many cases, transpiring in the town or the country, of women demolished by "morbific peripheral influence."

So the bodies of his women mature like all the nature out of doors, and become capable of entertaining the great passion with its own strenuous, unconscious innocence, with its honest ardor, with its native directness. Obscure ailments do not warp his verses, nor twang sick pathos out of their nerves. And we seek the society of these unsensational women, just as we seek Shakspeare's verse itself; with the same hope to earn repose for the soul which has been so taxed by the strained rhetoric of later writers. For relief, we recur to the pregnant moderation of Shakspeare's style. Pyrotechnics tire the eye, and send the dazed spectator groping home, as they seem to make more darkness by exploding. One reason for the revival of interest and love for Shakspeare may be found in a natural reaction from artifice and overwrought expression. The heated mind has discovered an oasis and deep well that wait in this sirocco-stricken age with coolness for our hearts. How eagerly we run toward this shadowed margin where his great power is greatly tempered to our human feeling! His vivacity has been so bred by repose that it never strays beyond the line