s do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends,
And act what we must only think, which never
Returns us thanks.

Some of her general reflections have a sententious depth and a
contemplative melancholy, which remind us of Isabella:--

Our remedies oft in themselves do lie
Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

Impossible be strange events to those
That weigh their pains in sense; and do suppose
What hath been cannot be.

He that of greatest works is finisher,
Oft does them by the weakest minister;
So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown,
When judges have been babes.

Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits,
Where hope is coldest, and despair most sits.

Her sentiments in the same manner are remarkable for the union of
profound sense with the most passionate feeling; and when her language
is figurative, which is seldom, the picture presented to us is
invariably touched either with a serious, a lofty, or a melancholy
beauty. For instance:--

It were all one
That I should love a bright particular star,
And think to wed it--he's so far above me.

And when she is brought to choose a husband from among the young lords
at the court, her heart having already made its election, the
strangeness of that very privilege for which she had ventured all,
nearly overpowers her, and she says beautifully:--

The blushes on my cheeks thus whisper me,
"We blush that thou shouldst choose;--but be refused,
Let the white death sit on that cheek for ever
We'll ne'er come there again!"

In her soliloquy after she has been forsaken by Bertram, the beauty lies
in the intense feeling, the force and simplicity of the expressions.
There is little imagery, and wherever it occurs, it is as bold as it is
beautiful, and springs out of the energy of the sentiment, and the
pathos of the situation. She has been reading his cruel letter.

_Till I have no wife I have nothing in France._
'Tis bitter!
Nothing in France, until he has no wife!
Thou shalt have none, Roussillon, none in France,
Then hast thou all again. Poor lord! is't I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war?