nguish,
the terror, the despair; the aching adieu; the pang unutterable of
parted affection; and rapture, truth, and tenderness trampled into an
early grave: but still an Elysian grace lingers round the whole, and the
blue sky of Italy bends over all!

In the delineation of that sentiment which forms the groundwork of the
drama, nothing in fact can equal the power of the picture, but its
inexpressible sweetness and its perfect grace: the passion which has
taken possession of Juliet's whole soul, has the force, the rapidity,
the resistless violence of the torrent: but she is herself as "moving
delicate," as fair, as soft, as flexible as the willow that bends over
it, whose light leaves tremble even with the motion of the current which
hurries beneath them. But at the same time that the pervading sentiment
is never lost sight of, and is one and the same throughout, the
individual part of the character in all its variety is developed, and
marked with the nicest discrimination. For instance,--the simplicity of
Juliet is very different from the simplicity of Miranda: her innocence
is not the innocence of a desert island. The energy she displays does
not once remind us of the moral grandeur of Isabel, or the intellectual
power of Portia;--it is founded in the strength of passion, not in the
strength of character:--it is accidental rather than inherent, rising
with the tide of feeling or temper, and with it subsiding. Her romance
is not the pastoral romance of Perdita, nor the fanciful romance of
Viola; it is the romance of a tender heart and a poetical imagination.
Her inexperience is not ignorance: she has heard that there is such a
thing as falsehood, though she can scarcely conceive it. Her mother and
her nurse have perhaps warned her against flattering vows and man's
inconstancy; or she has even

----Turned the tale by Ariosto told,
Of fair Olympia, loved and left, of old!

Hence that bashful doubt, dispelled almost as soon as felt--

Ah, gentle Romeo!
If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully.

That conscious shrinking from her own confession--

Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny
What I have spoke!

The ingenuous simplicity of her avowal--

Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won,
I'll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo--but else, not for the world!
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou may'st think m