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lent, frightful, or discordant feeling is suffered to mingle with that soft impression of melancholy left within the heart, and which Schlegel compares to one long, endless sigh. "A youthful passion," says Goethe, (alluding to one of his own early attachments,) "which is conceived and cherished without any certain object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night: it rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls--it bursts--consuming and destroying all around, even as itself expires." * * * * * To conclude: love, considered under its poetical aspect, is the union of passion and imagination and accordingly, to one of these, or to both, all the qualities of Juliet's mind and heart (unfolding and varying as the action of the drama proceeds) may be finally traced; the former concentrating all those natural impulses, fervent affections and high energies, which lend the character its internal charm, its moral power and individual interest: the latter diverging from all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external glow, its beauty, its vigor, its freshness, and its truth. With all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and education: and the action of the drama, while it serves to develope the character, appears but its natural and necessary result. "Le mystere de l'existence," said Madame de Stael to her daughter, "c'est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos peines." HELENA. In the character of Juliet we have seen the passionate and the imaginative blended in an equal degree, and in the highest conceivable degree as combined with delicate female nature. In Helena we have a modification of character altogether distinct; allied, indeed, to Juliet as a picture of fervent, enthusiastic, self-forgetting love, but differing wholly from her in other respects; for Helen is the union of strength of passion with strength of character. "To be tremblingly alive to gentle impressions, and yet be able to preserve, when the prosecution of a design requires it, an immovable heart amidst even the most imperious causes of subduing emotion, is perhaps not an impossible constitution of mind, but it is the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity."[30] Such a character, almo
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