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