thought of which wrings
her pure breast more sharply than the pangs of death.

These are plain cases of virtue tried and purified in the straits of
self-humiliation, virtue strained, as it were, through a close-knit
fabric of difficulties and hardships, and triumphing over the wrongs
that threaten its total defacement, and even turning its obstructions
into a substance glorious as its own; that is, they are exceptional
instances of a conscious departure from the letter and form of moral
beauty for the fuller and clearer manifestation of its spirit and
soul.

Nor are the virtues of Shakespeare's men and women the mere result of
a certain felicity and harmony of nature, or the spontaneous movements
of a happy instinct so strong in them that they do what is right
without knowing or meaning it. No; his Henry the Fifth, and Horatio,
and Kent, and Edgar, and Posthumus, his Helena, and Isabella, and
Cordelia, and Hermione, and Imogen, and Catharine, are most truly
"beings breathing thoughtful breath." Virtue is with them a discipline
as well as a joy; a strong upright will is the backbone of it, and a
healthy conscience is its keeper. They all have conscious reasons for
what they do, and can state them with piercing eloquence, if occasion
bids. For so the Poet, much as he delights in that fineness of nature
or that innate grace which goes right of its own accord, evidently
prefers, even in women, the goodness that has passed through struggles
and temptations, and has its chief seat, not in impulse, but in
principle, a virtue tested, and not merely instinctive: rather say, he
delights most in the virtue that proceeds by a happy consent and
marriage of the two. He therefore does not place his highest
characters, whether men or women, in an atmosphere so pure that
average mortals cannot breathe in it: he depicts their moral nature in
conflict, with the powers of good and evil striving in them for the
mastery; and when the former prevail, it is because they have "a
strong siding champion, Conscience," to support them. Thus through
their weakness they come near enough to get hold of us, while at the
same time in their strength they are enough higher than we to lift us
upwards.

But Shakespeare's main peculiarity as a teacher of goodness lies in
this, that he keeps our moral sympathies in the right place without
discovering his own. With the one exception of Henry the Fifth, we
cannot perceive, from the delineation itself, wheth