s
As are those dulcet sounds at break of day,
That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear,
And summon him to marriage. Now he goes
With no less presence, but with much more love
Than young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea monster. I stand here for sacrifice.

Here, not only the feeling itself, born of the elastic and sanguine
spirit which had never been touched by grief, but the images in which it
comes arrayed to her fancy,--the bridegroom waked by music on his
wedding-morn,--the new-crowned monarch,--the comparison of Bassanio to
the young Alcides, and of herself to the daughter of Laomedon,--are all
precisely what would have suggested themselves to the fine poetical
imagination of Portia in such a moment.

Her passionate exclamations of delight, when Bassanio has fixed on the
right casket, are as strong as though she had despaired before. Fear and
doubt she could repel; the native elasticity of her mind bore up against
them; yet she makes us feel, that, as the sudden joy overpowers her
almost to fainting, the disappointment would as certainly have killed
her.

How all the other passions fleet to air,
As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,
And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy?
O love! be moderate, allay thy ecstasy;
In measure rain thy joy scant this excess;
I feel too much thy blessing: make it less,
For fear I surfeit!

Her subsequent surrender of herself in heart and soul, of her maiden
freedom, and her vast possessions, can never be read without deep
emotions; for not only all the tenderness and delicacy of a devoted
woman, are here blended with all the dignity which becomes the princely
heiress of Belmont, but the serious, measured self-possession of her
address to her lover, when all suspense is over, and all concealment
superfluous, is most beautifully consistent with the character. It is,
in truth, an awful moment, that in which a gifted woman first discovers,
that besides talents and powers, she has also passions and affections;
when she first begins to suspect their vast importance in the sum of her
existence; when she first confesses that her happiness is no longer in
her own keeping, but is surrendered forever and forever into the
dominion of another! The possession of uncommon powers of mind are so
far from affording relief or resource in the first intoxicating
surprise--I had