and disfigured her
face, and given vent to mourning and lamentations. But she does not seek
death, nor surrender herself to grief, nor court despair. She renews her
strength. She reserves her arts for another victim. She hopes to win
Octavius as she had won Julius and Antony; for she was only thirty-nine,
and still a queen. And for what? That she might retain her own
sovereignty, or the independence of Egypt,--still the most fertile of
countries, rich, splendid, and with grand traditions which went back
thousands of years; the oldest, and once the most powerful of
monarchies. _Her_ love was ever subservient to her interests. Antony
gave up ambition for love,--whatever that love was. It took possession
of his whole being, not pure and tender, but powerful, strange;
doubtless a mad infatuation, and perhaps something more, since it never
passed away,--admiration allied with desire, the worship of dazzling
gifts, though not of moral virtues. Would such a love have been
permanent? Probably not, since the object of it did not shine in the
beauty of the soul, but rather in the graces and adornments of the body,
intensified indeed by the lustre of bewitching social qualities and the
brightness of a cultivated intellect. It is hard to analyze a passionate
love between highly gifted people who have an intense development of
both the higher and the lower natures, and still more difficult when the
idol is a Venus Polyhymnia rather than a Venus Urania. But the love of
Antony, whether unwise, or mysterious, or unfortunate, was not feigned
or forced: it was real, and it was irresistible; he could not help it.
He was enslaved, bound hand and foot. His reason may have rallied to his
support, but his will was fettered. He may have had at times dark and
gloomy suspicions,--that he was played with, that he was cheated, that
he would be deserted, that Cleopatra was false and treacherous. And yet
she reigned over him; he could not live without her. She was all in all
to him, so long as the infatuation lasted; and it had lasted fourteen
years, with increasing force, in spite of duty and pressing labors, the
calls of ambition and the lust of power. In this consuming and abandoned
passion, for fourteen years,--so strange and inglorious, and for a woman
so unworthy, even if he were no better than she,--we see one of the
great mysteries of our complex nature, not uncommon, but insoluble.

I have no respect for Antony, and but little admiration. I