Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/323

 as her playful wit. Her mind recognizes the serious change that must befall her fortune: in the first moment of it there comes a deep humility that makes her speech kneel at the feet of the man whom she will marry. For her great superiority is free from the taint of conceit, save "a noble and a true conceit of godlike amity."

We sometimes discover that gifted women are over-consciously aware of the effect which they produce. While we admire the iris on the peacock's neck, a bridling runs through it as if to set the colors in a better light, and our attention is divided by the motion. The orator's greatest gift is self-absorption. It strips his person to clothe his thought. His morals seem to gather luminosity out of the air, to become visible to men. The moment that the speaker listens to his own words, and snatches time between them to make the audience captive to his little private ovation, the people are less absorbed, begin to study the cut of his garments, and nod to each other how well they fit. Then the thought that was beginning to condense goes back like Ariel to the elements. When a woman's excellence reads on our faces that it is delightful, and begins also to be delighted, it throws a shadow: as we stand in it she seems less chaste than we thought her. All of Portia's talents share the inviolable reserve of her person, which seems to convey its modesty into the unspoken thought. How adorable is her humility!—

"You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand, an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd: