Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/299

 when the pipe of Pan is breathed upon by the clear west wind through the budding willows. Nothing competes with it but the throstle and song-sparrow: they seem to be weaving sacred nests out of the tones, to gather them into domestic privacy. Climb, count with delight the jealously guarded eggs, and do not blow them for your cabinet.

Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's women that it overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, and spread in a freshet of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind never tire of keeping in the air the light shuttlecock of their wit. It floats in an æther of animal spirits; and, if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly lends it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to conceal their emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick penetrate the disguise and claim the lips that mockingly escape thus? If these women suspect their hearts to be distilling a sigh, laughter sparkles into the recess and exposes the illicit business. It is just like the men to roam about in disordered attire, with blue, inclement features, shaking with the "quotidian-tertian" of their love-turn. If they do not go about thus, it is all the same: then they are rallied for not being in Cupid's fashion. "Your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation." The gladness of these women would be cautioned at the lorn sight to defend themselves from infection.

Orlando sticks his rhymes up in the forest, like a bill-poster of Radway's Ready Relief, deforming the sturdier