cle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on
the stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a
pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the
mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with
how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that
his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it
a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolen
sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic
frailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember
that to their own innocent infantine perceptions the first obscure
electric revelation of what Blake calls "the Eternal Female" was given
through a blind wondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning on
the baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise of
Shakespeare's Cleopatra.

Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinence
from the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right. He has utterly
rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of any
lesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires. And we
need not Antony's example to show us that these are less than straws in
the balance.

Entre elle et l'univers qui s'offraient a la fois
Il hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix.

Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has
Shakespeare's self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination,
with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for
love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale. Himself
a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world,
and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for
her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator
of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the
sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom
"Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in
time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," to whom at
the very last

The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch,
That hurts, and is desired.

To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand
might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her
sisters of his