and found him singing a hymn, and accompanying himself at the harpsichord. When he had finished, he knelt down and prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself, that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He then burst into tears, and

his reason again fled.

What preacher need moralize on this story? What words save the simplest are requisite to tell it? It is too terrible for tears. The thought of such a misery smites me down in submission before the Ruler of kings and men, the Monarch Supreme over empires and republics, the inscrutable Dispenser of life, death, happiness, victory. "O brothers," I said to those who heard me first in America, "O brothers, speaking the same dear mother tongue; O comrades, enemies no more, let us take a mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse, and call a truce to battle! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who was cast lower than the poorest: dead, whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his throne; buffeted by rude hands; with his children in revolt; the darling of his old age killed before him untimely; our Lear hangs over her breathless lips, and cries,' Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little!'

"Vex not his ghost: oh, let him pass! He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world

Stretch him out longer!'

Hush, Strife and Quarrel, over the solemn grave! Sound, Trumpets, a mournful march! Fall, Dark Curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his grief, his awful tragedy!"

JULIET.

BY ANNA JAMESON.

LOVE, thou teacher! O Grief, thou tamer! and Time, thou healer of human hearts! Bring hither all your deep and serious revela

tions! And ye too, rich fancies of unbruised, unbowed youth, — ye visions of long-perished hopes, shadows of unborn joys, gay colorings of the dawn of existence whatever memory hath treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art, — all soft and delicate images, all lovely forms, divinest voices and entrancing melodies, gleams of sunnier skies and fairer climes, Italian moonlights and airs that "breathe of the sweet South,” — now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination, live once more to my heart! Come, thronging around me, all inspirations that wait on passion, on power, on beauty; give me to tread, not bold, and yet unblamed, within the inmost sanctuary of Shakespeare's genius, in Juliet's moonlight bower and Miranda's enchanted isle !

It is not without emotion that I attempt to touch on the character of Juliet. Such beautiful things have already been said of her only to be exceeded in beauty by the subject that inspired them!- it is im

possible to say anything better; but it is possible to say something more. Such, in fact, is the simplicity, the truth, and the loveliness of Juliet's character that we are not at first aware of its complexity, its depth, and its variety. There is in it an intensity of passion, a singleness of purpose, an entireness, a completeness of effect, which we feel as a whole; and to attempt to analyze the impression thus conveyed at once to soul and sense is as if, while hanging over a half-blown rose, and reveling in its intoxicating perfume, we should pull it asunder, leaflet by leaflet, the better to display its bloom and fragrance. Yet how otherwise should we disclose the wonders of its formation, or do justice to the skill of the divine hand that hath thus fashioned it in its beauty?

Love, as a passion, forms the ground-work of the drama. Now, admitting the axiom of Rochefoucauld, that there is but one love, though a thousand different copies, yet the true sentiment itself has as many different aspects as the human soul of which it forms a part. It is not only modified by the individual character and temperament, but it is under the influence of climate and circumstance. The love that is calm in one moment shall show itself vehement and tumultuous at another. The love that is wild and passionate in the South is deep and contemplative in the North; as the Spanish or Roman girl perhaps poisons a rival, or stabs herself for the sake of a living lover, and the German or Russian girl pines into the grave for love of the false, the absent, or the dead. Love is ardent or deep, bold or timid, jealous or confiding, impatient or humble, hopeful or desponding, and yet there are not many loves, but one love.

All Shakespeare's women, being essentially women, either love, or have loved, or are capable of loving; but Juliet is love itself. The passion is her state of being, and out of it she has no existence. It is the soul within her soul; the pulse within her heart; the lifeblood along her veins, “blending with every atom of her frame." The love that is so chaste and dignified in Portia, so airy delicate and fearless in Miranda, so sweetly confiding in Perdita, so playfully fond in Rosalind, so constant in Imogen, so devoted in Desdemona, so fervent in Helen, so tender in Viola, is each and all of these in Juliet. All these remind us of her; but she reminds us of nothing but her own sweet self; or, if she does, it is of the Gismunda, or the Lisetta, or the Fiammetta of Boccaccio, to whom she is allied, not in the character or circumstances, but in the truly Italian spirit, the glowing, national complexion of the portrait.

There was an Italian painter who said that the secret of all effect in color consisted in white upon black, and black upon white. How perfectly did Shakespeare understand this secret of effect, and how beautifully he has exemplified it in Juliet !—

"So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows!"

Thus she and her lover are in contrast with all around them. They are all love, surrounded with all hate; all harmony, surrounded with all discord; all pure nature, in the midst of polished and artificial life. Juliet, like Portia, is the foster-child of opulence and splendor she dwells in a fair city; she has been nurtured in a palace; she clasps her robe with jewels;

she braids her hair with rainbow-tinted pearls; but in herself she has no more connection with the trappings around her than the lovely exotic, transplanted from some Eden-like climate, has with the carved and gilded conservatory which has reared and sheltered its luxuriant beauty.

But in this vivid impression of contrast there is nothing abrupt or harsh. A tissue of beautiful poetry weaves together the principal figures and the subordinate personages. The consistent truth of the costume and the exquisite gradations of relief with which the most opposite hues are approximated blend all into harmony. Romeo and Juliet are not poetical beings placed on a prosaic background; nor are they, like Thekla and Max in the Wallenstein, two angels of light amid the darkest and harshest, the most debased and revolting aspects of humanity; but every circumstance and every personage and every shade of character in each tends to the development of the sentiment which is the subject of the drama. The poetry, too, the richest that can possibly be conceived, is interfused through all the characters; the splendid imagery lavished upon all with the careless prodigality of genius; and the whole is lighted up into such a sunny brilliance of effect as though Shakespeare had really transported himself into Italy, and had drunk to intoxication of her genial atmosphere. How truly it has been said that "although Romeo and Juliet are in love, they are not love-sick"! What a false idea would anything of the mere whining amoroso give us of Romeo, such as he really is in Shakespeare, the noble, gallant, ardent, brave, and witty! And Juliet, — with even less truth could the phrase or idea apply