ppear, that he cannot help loving her. She
knows right well that the choice must be mutual, else marriage is
rather a sacrilege than a sacrament; and the great question is, how
she may win him to reciprocate her choice: nothing less than this will
suffice her; and she justly takes it as her part to _inspire_ him with
the feeling, understanding perfectly that neither talk nor force can
be of any use to that end. Even a love that springs from a sense of
duty is not what she wants: her own love did not spring from that
source. So she "would not have him till she does deserve him," yet
knows not how that desert should ever be: still she cannot put off the
faith that love will sooner or later triumph, if worthily shown by
deeds. He is much noted as a fine instance of manly beauty: all are
taken with his handsome person. It is not, probably ought not to be,
in womanhood, to be proof against such attractions. In the sweetness
of their youthful intercourse, this has silently got the mastery of
her thoughts, and penetrated her being through and through:

"Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour; to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart's table."

And now she must needs strive with all her might, by loving ways, by
kind acts, by self-sacrificing works, to catch his heart, as he has
caught hers. Then too a holy instinct of womanhood teaches her that a
man must be hard indeed, to resist the wedded mother of his children,
and most of all, to keep his heart untouched by the power of a wife
when burdened with a mother's precious wealth. Therewithal she rightly
apprehends the danger Bertram is in from the wordy, cozening squirt,
the bedizened, scoundrelly dandiprat, who has so beguiled his youth
and ignorance. She must bless and sweeten him out of that contagion
into the religion of home; and she feels that nothing but an
honourable love of herself can save him. This she aims at, and finally
accomplishes.

Coleridge incidentally speaks of Helena as "Shakespeare's loveliest
character." And Mrs. Jameson, from whose judgment I shall take no
appeal, sets her down as exemplifying that union of strength and
tenderness which Foster, in one of his _Essays_, describes as being
"the utmost and rarest endowment of humanity";--a character, she
adds, "almost as hard to delineate in fiction as to find in real
life." Without either questioning or subscribing these statements,