the earth, that we
are tempted to forget the heaven of invention from which he brought
them. The most beautiful of spirits, they are the most tender of
daughters, lovers, and wives. They are "airy shapes," but they "syllable
men's names." Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia, Viola, Perdita, Miranda,
Desdemona, Hermione, Portia, Isabella, Imogen, Cordelia,--if their names
do not call up their natures, the most elaborate analysis of criticism
wilt be of no avail. Do you say that these women are slightly idealized
portraits of actual women? Was Cordelia, for example, simply a good,
affectionate daughter of a foolish old king? To Shakespeare, himself,
she evidently partook of divineness; and he hints of the still ecstasy
of contemplation in which her nature first rose upon his imagination,
when, speaking through the lips of a witness of her tears, he hallows
them as they fall:--

"She shook the holy water from her heavenly eyes."

And these Shakespearian women, though all radiations from one great
ideal of womanhood, are at the same time intensely individualized. Each
has a separate soul, and the processes of intellect as well as emotion
are different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with the faculty,
and is steeped in the atmosphere, of imagination; but who could mistake
the imagination of Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen?--the
loitering, lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating whatever
it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency, the flash and the
bolt, of the other? Imogen is perhaps the most completely expressed of
Shakespeare's women; for in her every faculty and affection is fused
with imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is combined with
vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind darts in an instant to the
ultimate of everything. After she has parted with her husband, she does
not merely say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged, and
in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up, she goes up; she would
have charged him, she says,

"At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
T'encounter me with orisons, for then
_I am in heaven for him_."

When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possible object of his
sensual whim is at once consumed in the fire that leaps from her
impassioned lips,--

"Some jay of Italy,
Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him."

Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive actio