t to resound with your name." "Oswald," said
Corinne, "if the applause which I am about to receive, have the power to
affect me, will it not be because it is witnessed by you? And should I
display any talent, will it not owe its success to you, who have
animated and inspired it? Love, poetry, and religion, all that is born
of enthusiasm, is in harmony with nature; and in beholding the azure
sky, in yielding to the impression which it causes, I have a juster
comprehension of the sentiments of Juliet, I am more worthy of Romeo."
"Yes, thou art worthy of him, celestial creature!" cried Lord Nelville;
"'tis only a weakness of the soul, this jealousy of thy talents, this
desire to live alone with thee in the universe. Go, receive the meed of
public homage, go; but let that look of love, still more divine than thy
genius, be directed to me alone!" They then parted, and Lord Nelville
went and took his seat in theatre, awaiting the pleasure of beholding
the appearance of Corinne.

Romeo and Juliet is an Italian subject; the scene is placed in Verona,
where is still to be seen the tomb of those two lovers. Shakespeare has
written this piece with that Southern imagination at once impassioned
and pleasing; that imagination which triumphs in happiness, but which,
nevertheless, passes so easily from happiness to despair, and from
despair to death. The impressions are rapid; but one easily feels that
these rapid impressions will be ineffaceable. It is the force of nature,
and not the frivolity of the heart, which beneath an energetic climate
hastens the development of the passions. The soil is not light, though
vegetation is prompt; and Shakespeare has seized, more happily than any
other foreign writer, the national character of Italy and that fecundity
of the mind which invents a thousand ways of varying the expression of
the same sentiments--the oriental eloquence which makes use of all the
images of nature to paint what is passing in the heart. It is not as in
Ossian, one same tint, one uniform sound which responds constantly to
the most sensitive chords of the heart; the multiplied colours that
Shakespeare employs in Romeo and Juliet, do not give a cold affectation
to his style; it is the ray divided, reflected, and varied, which
produces these colours, in which we ever feel that fire they proceed
from. There is a life and a brilliancy in this composition which
characterise the country and the inhabitants. The play of Romeo and
J