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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
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