Part 16 (1/2)

”For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are , sooner lost and won, Than women's are”

And the moment after he asserts:

”There is no wo a passion As love doth give , to hold so much; they lack retention

Alas! their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt!”

Hamlet contradicts himself, too: at one moment he declares that his soul is immortal, and at the next is full of despair But Hamlet is so elaborate a portrait, built up of so many minute touches, that self-contradiction is a part, and a necessary part, of his ht” reveals himself as it were accidentally; we know little more of him than that he loves music and love, books and flowers, and that he despises wealth and coly, when he contradicts hi himself speak freely without much care for the coherence of characterization And the result of this frankness is that he has given a more intimate, a more confidential, sketch of hiiven us in any play except perhaps ”Hamlet” and ”Macbeth”

I hardly need to prove that Shakespeare in his earliest plays, as in his latest, in his Sonnets as in his darkest tragedy, loved flowers and music In alht One only needs to recall the song in ”A Midsuht's Dream,” ”I know a bank,” or Perdita's exquisite words:

”Daffodils, That come before the s dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath; pale priht Phoebus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and The crown-i one”;

or Arviragus' praise of Ien:

”Thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azured harebell like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander Outsweetened not thy breath”

Shakespeare praises ard the trait as characteristic of his deepest nature Take this play which we are handling now Not only the Duke, but both the heroines, Viola and Olivia, love”in many sorts of music,” and Olivia admits that she would rather hear Viola solicit love than ”music from the spheres” Romeo almost confounds music with love, as does Duke Orsino:

”How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, Like softest ain:

”And let rich in'd happiness that both Receive in either by this dear encounter”

It is a curious and characteristic fact that Shakespeare gives alave ten years earlier to the Duke in ”Twelfth Night” In both passages oes with passion to allay its madness:

”Thisboth their fury and my passion With its sweet air”

and Duke Orsino says:

”That old and antique song we heard last night, Methought it did relieve my passion much”

This confession is so peculiar; shows, too, so exquisitely fine a sensibility, that its repetition ard it as Shakespeare's

The iven to Lorenzo in the ”Merchant of Venice,” and itthat Lorenzo is not a character, but, like Claudio, aShakespeare was almost as well content, it appears, to play the lover as to play the Duke I cannot help transcribing the h they ue:

”Hoeet the ht sleeps upon this bank!

Here e sit, and let the sounds of ht Become the touches of sweet harmony

Sit, Jessica: Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold

There's not the sel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims

Such harmony is in irossly close it in, we cannot hear it”