Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/298

 found Nature's own fulness and harmony, the finely blended color of passion and thought. But nowadays the daffodils that used to

"Take The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, Or Cytherea's breath; bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial,"

have been plied with guano, dosed with new-fangled liquid manures, till their cosmetic and perfume announce a kind of harlotry: we ogle, sigh, languishingly sniff, and die of a rose in a rheumatic pain.

The gamut of feeling among Shakspeare's women is the clear and perfect octave which built the English glee and madrigal, whose untutored music was "the food of love." And love was entirely welcome, like the daylight; not put off and played with as if by the effeminacies of some Asiatic musical scale, whose eighth and quarter tones cannot be distinguished by a well modulated ear.

"What is Love? 'tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What's to come is still unsure; In delay there lies no plenty: Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,  Youth's a stuff will not endure."

Does this have a crude ring of the bivouac to any ear which has been accustomed to the macaronic variations of modern artists, who torture the great theme and force its simple blitheness through the brass crooks of a keyed cornet? 'Tis an honest love whose month is ever May,