The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, That birds would sing, and think it were not night. What other poet has so felicitously portrayed all that is picturesque and lovely in a summer's dawn;-pouring on our souls all the freshness and cheerfulness of the returning sunlight? Look, love! what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east : Among the masterly passages of the great dramatist the soliloquy of Juliet, on drinking the opiate : may Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again. My dismal scene I needs must act alone.— What if this mixture do not work at all? be classed [Laying down the dagger. What if it be a poison, which the friar I fear, it is and yet, methinks, it should not, To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? Or, if I live, is it not very like, The horrible conceit of death and night, Where, for these many hundred years, the bones So early waking,-what with loathsome smells; [She throws herself on the bed. In Othello we have many gems of thought: here is one : Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: But he that filches from me my good name, Robs me of that which not enriches him, We all remember these admirable lines: The quality of mercy is not strained; The throned monarch better than his crown. What a sublime passage is that on the end of all earthly glories: The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, What can be finer in structure of words than the speech of Mark Antony over the body of Cæsar? Or, take another variety— Othello's relation of his courtship, to the Senate; or, still another familiar, yet exquisite passage, from Romeo and Juliet, on Dreams, commencing: O then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. For wonderful condensation and vigor, it has been thought that the passage in As You Like It, on the world being compared to a stage, is one of the greatest gems of Shakspeare: but we have the authority of Bunsen for assigning the highest merit to the description of a moonlight night with music, in The Merchant of Venice : How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: Now for a cluster of little brilliants, rich and rare : |