its guide, the human heart here puts forth its blossoms afresh, and makes the forest vocal with its music; for "lips that may forget love in the crowd cannot forget it here." They have brought with them all the intelligence and refinement of the court, without any of its vanities or vexations; all the graces of art and all the simplicities of nature have met together in joyous, loving sisterhood. Nature throws her protecting arms around them; beauty pitches her tents before them; heaven rains its riches upon them: with " no enemy but winter and rough weather," peace hath taken up her abode with them; and they have nothing to do but "fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world." To the duke and his "co-mates and brothers in exile,"

"Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel they but the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference; as, the icy fang,

And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,

Which, when it bites and blows upon the body,

Even till it shrinks with cold, they smile, and say,

This is no flattery; these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade them what they are.

Sweet are the uses of adversity;

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this their life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing:"

they have the inward, happy grace,

"That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style."

Dwelling amid pastoral influences, and subsisting on the products of the chase, without being shepherds they present the ideal perfection of pastoral life. Even the necessities of their perishable nature but minister occasions and motives to generous feeling and noble senti

ment.

Perhaps there is no other work of the poet's wherein we so much feel the propriety of Milton's tribute to him :

"And sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child,
Warbles his native wood-notes wild."

The play is instinct with woodland associations; the spirit of the place is upon its inhabitants, its genius within them: we almost breathe with them the fragrance of the forest, and listen to

"The melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,"

and feel

"The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That have their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring."

Even the court fool, however crystallized into his vocation, gets thawed by the influences of the place, and experiences a sort of spiritual rejuvenescence, so that turn the fresh hues and odours

his wit catches at every of his new whereabout. man or nature changes

For it is hard to
For it is hard to say whether

most when they are brought and kept together. Mutually sympathetic, each puts on the other's likeness, and they become resonant of each other's voice and redolent of each other's breath. Truly,

I know of no other poem in English so replete as this with the heart's finer fragrance: but it is the fragrance of the crushed rather than the smiling flower; a fragrance that saddens indeed, but only to purify and instruct. The mutual life-deep attachment between the princesses is one of Shakspeare's sweetest pictures. Instinct with the soul of moral beauty and of female tenderness, it strikes home to the very seat of grace within us. No wonder, that the poet's mind, enriched with such a conception, became redundant of beautiful thoughts and images. The history of their dual unity, painted with such witchery of perspective;—

"We still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together;
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,

Still we went coupled and inseparable ;"

reveals the inmost life of friendship, and tells us beforehand that the banishment of one must be the banishment of both; while Celia's expression :

"Pr'ythee, be cheerful; know'st thou not, the duke
Hath banished me, his daughter?

No? hath not? Rosalind then lacks the love,
Which teaches me that thou and I are one;-

falls upon the ear like music out of heaven. The attachment between the banished duke and his compan

ions, and that between the faithful old servant, Adam, and his persecuted young master, are of a piece with that between the princesses. As much alike, perhaps, as the differences of age, of sex, and of situation, would allow, they all go to show the rich productiveness of the human heart, when its soil is disencumbered of the usurping vices, follies, and passions, of artificial life. And yet, surpassingly beautiful as is the representation, it strikes us rather as a disclosure of the real than as a creation of the ideal; the poet seems to bring us nothing new, but only to lend us eyes wherewith to read the old and when we look through them, we wonder that we have never before seen the things whereon we have always been gazing.

Of several of the characters it is hard telling which have most claim on our attention. Properly speaking, the play has no hero; for it is purely a drama of sentiment and character, not of action. Though Orlando, the persecuted younger brother, occupies the foreground, the characters are strictly co-ordinate; the very design of the work precluding any subordination among them. Diverted by fortune from all their cherished plans and purposes, they pass before us in just that moral and intellectual dishabille which best reveals their inborn graces of heart and mind. Accordingly, as indeed the name itself imports, the plot, like Wordsworth's river, "windeth at its own sweet will," the beginning apparently taking no thought of the end, the end never troubling itself to gather up the several threads into a catastrophe. Every thing, in a word, falls out just as it likes, and just as we like too, if willing to be delighted and instructed, without beating our brains about the why

and wherefore. All the events dancing up as it were spontaneously and at random, the play exhibits that rare perfection of art, which makes us forget but that we are amid the freedoms and negligences of nature.

ORLANDO.

ORLANDO is a model of a young gentleman, who, without any occasion for heroism, displays the qualities of a hero. Brave, gentle, modest and magnanimous ; never thinking of his birth but to avoid dishonouring it; in his noble-heartedness himself forgetting, and causing us to forget his nobility of rank, he is just such a man as every other true man would choose for his best friend. Never schooled, yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved," it is but natural that fraternal envy and hate should have turned his virtues into "sanctified and holy traitors" to him. That his humblest servant should also be his highest eulogist, is a happy illustration of the poet's skill in making his characters reflect one another while expressing themselves. Their generous oblivion of self and solicitude for each other affords a delightful picture of "the antique world, where service sweat for love and duty, not for hire," and beautifully exemplifies the power of affection in two noble natures coming over the widest diversities of rank. Orlando's tilt of wit with the melancholy Jaques, upon their first interview, proves him at once no less wise and good than witty: his uniform abstinence on other occasions from using powers so brilliant, yet so mischievous, discovering a strength of principle still more