Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth:
But either it was different in blood,
Or else misgraffed in respect of years,
Or else it stood upon the choice of friends;
Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up;
So quick bright things come to confusion.'

We remember once quoting these lines to a lady, and being
rather taken aback by her remark, 'They are very beautiful,
but I don't, think they are true.' We really had forgot for
the moment the straightforward, matter-of-fact sense of
which they are capable, and were not adverting to the
possibility of their being understood to mean that--nothing
but love-crosses are going, and that no tolerable amount of
comfort or happiness is to be found in the life matrimonial,
or in any of the approaches towards it. Every intelligent
student of Shakspeare's, however, will at once feel that the
poet's mind speedily passes away from the idea with which he
starts, and becomes merged in a far wider theme, viz., in
the disenchantment to which all lofty imaginations are
liable, the disappointment to which all extravagant earthly
hopes and wishes are doomed. This, in fact, is distinctly
expressed in the last line, and in this sense alone can the
words he regarded as at all touching or impressive. Sudden
expansions and transitions of thought, then, are nothing
more than what is common to all poetry; and when we find the
Hebrew bards, in their prophetic songs, mingling in the
closest conjunction the anticipations of the glories of
Solomon's reign, or the happy prospects of a return from
Babylon, with the higher glory and happiness of Messiah's
advent, such transitions of thought are in perfect
accordance with the ordinary laws of poetry, and ought not
to perplex even the most unimaginative