was
especially prevalent in Italy. Shakspeare has ridiculed it in many
places with exquisite humor; but he wished to show us that it has its
serious as well as its comic aspect. Romeo, then, is introduced to us
with perfect truth of costume, as the thrall of a dreaming, fanciful
passion for the scornful Rosaline, who had forsworn to love; and on her
charms and coldness, and on the power of love generally, he descants to
his companions in pretty phrases, quite in the style and taste of the
day.[24]

Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!

Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lover's eyes;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lover's tears.

But when once he has beheld Juliet, and quaffed intoxicating draughts of
hope and love from her soft glance, how all these airy fancies fade
before the soul-absorbing reality! The lambent fire that played round
his heart, burns to that heart's very core. We no longer find him
adorning his lamentations in picked phrases, or making a confidant of
his gay companions: he is no longer "for the numbers that Petrarch
flowed in;" but all is consecrated, earnest, rapturous, in the feeling
and the expression. Compare, for instance, the sparkling antithetical
passages just quoted, with one or two of his passionate speeches to or
of Juliet:--

Heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives! &c.

Ah Juliet! if the measure of thy joy
Be heaped like mine, and that thy skill be more
To blazon it, then sweeten with thy breath
This neighbour air, and let rich music's tongue
Unfold the imagin'd happiness, that both
Receive in either by this dear encounter.

Come what sorrow may,
It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.

How different! and how finely the distinction is drawn! His first
passion is indulged as a waking dream, a reverie of the fancy; it is
depressing, indolent, fantastic; his second elevates him to the third
heaven, or hurries him to despair. It rushes to its object through all
impediments, defies all dangers, and seeks at last a triumphant grave,
in the arms of her he so loved. Thus Romeo's previous attachment to
Rosaline is so contrived as to exhibit to us another variety in that
passion, which