God has joined their hearts, and neither the frowns of fortune, nor the feuds of families, nor the maxims of worldly policy can prevent or ought to prevent their joining hands: but as their hearts are joined in mutual love, so their hands must be joined in mutual honour. The conventionalities of society have no hand in leading them, and therefore have no power to mislead them. In the ardor of a self-forgetting, self-annulling passion every earthly consideration,-friends, fortune, even life itself, every thing indeed but union with each other has faded from their thoughts: but, while they love each other with a love as boundless as the sea, they at the same time love in each other whatever is pure, and precious, and heavenly in their unsoiled imaginations. Nay, all they have hitherto known and prized of life seems flat and insipid compared to the new life they have found. Their love' is now the precious jewel that enriches and consecrates the casket of their earthly existence; spoiled of this they cast it from them as useless and worthless.

"Come what sorrow can,

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives them,”

in each other's sight. Bereft of this, nothing remains for them but the bitter dregs, from which all the wine of life has evaporated; and they dash to earth the stale and vapid draught, when it has lost all the spirit that caused it to foam and sparkle before them.-Were we skilled in the ways of Providence, we might anticipate from the first, that these two noblest and loveliest of beings, the pride and hope of their respective friends,

even because they are themselves most innocent would fall a sacrifice for the guilt of their families; and that in and through their death would be punished and healed those fatal strifes and enmities which have made it at once so natural and so dangerous for them to love.

The lovers, it is true, are not much given to reflection. Both have indeed abundance of intellect, but their intelligence is made spontaneous by force of passion and imagination. Reflection can legitimately come to them only by experience, which they have not yet acquired. Life lies glittering with golden hopes before them, owing its enchantment perhaps only to the distance; and it is easy to see that they must die or suffer a disappointment worse than death. They have not yet eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but they must eat it if they live. A throng of heavenly dreams has been awakened within them, and out of these they shape their expectations. Without experience of life, strangers to indifference, untried by disappointment, what have they, what can they have, to abate the transports of their newborn happiness, to hinder their gushing tide of joy from flowing on without stint or measure, to check the ardour of faith, of hope, of constancy just rising in their bosoms? Knowing the rich promises of their own hearts, but not the poor performances of the world, they therefore frame their anticipations according to the infinitude of their own passions and hopes. Alas! the paradise which they seem to see before them, exists only within them: their bliss seems perfect only because their bounty is infinite; but such bounty and such bliss may not with mortal man abide. The heav enly fire that burns within them, even if the world could

feed it, their hearts could not sustain it, and even if their hearts could sustain it, the world could not feed it.

66

"Too, too contracted are these walls of flesh

For any passion of the soul that leads
To ecstasy; and, all the crooked paths

Of time and change disdaining, takes its course
Along the line of limitless desires."

Not only must such lovers die in the triumphs of their love, but such love can triumph only in the death of the lovers. Edens like this can be let down from heaven upon us only for a few moments, and, when withdrawn, they must perforce either take themselves away from us, or take us away from earth along with them. So true it is that life gives us visions which death alone can enable us to realize; and heaven dances before us only to allure us to the grave.

"The soul that rises within us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home."

"This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet ;"

such is the expectation of the inexperienced lovers, little dreaming that its very sweetness would provoke its enemy, and it must prove

"a bud bit by an envious worm,

Ere it could spread its sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate its beauty to the sun :"

and when we look for the promised blossom, behold,

"Death lies on it like an untimely frost

Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”

Of the catastrophe of this play, I can but repeat the remark of Schlegel, that "the echo it leaves in the mind resembles a single but endless sigh." Yet no reflecting mind would wish it other than it is; for such a mind must see that the grave is the only place on earth that can preserve the union of the lovers as perfect as we see it and as lasting as we wish it. Awful as is their fate, they seem pitiable only in their lives, and enviable in their death; for the tomb does not extinguish, it inshrines the beauty of their love, and therein is far kinder to them than life would be. And who is there but would cheerfully share their fate for the sake of being and loving like them? Truly, he who would not willingly pay such a price in exchange for such a triumph seems worthy but to live; for,

"What comes from heaven, to heaven by nature tends,
And if kept back from thence, its course is short."

It is not the passion of the lovers, but the enmity of their houses, that is punished in their death; and upon their tomb we read an awful lesson, not against loving to excess, but against that savage refinement, that barbarism of civilization, which makes love excessive by endeavouring to exclude it from its rightful place in life; and which subjects men to the just revenges of nature, because it teaches them to thwart her noblest, holiest purposes. Of course it is the tendency of evil, under

Providence, to work woe, and through woe to work its own cure; individuals and communities suffer from their vices, and by that suffering are reformed and purified. Thus, in the case before us, the pervading, absorbing, devouring selfishness of society generates the fiercest strifes and discords between its leading families; and those strifes and discords result in the death of their favourite members,-the very members through whom they had thought most to promote their interests and advance their rival pretensions: earth's best and fairest creatures are snatched away, because, by reason of their virtue, they can best afford to die, and because, for the same reason, their death will be most deeply felt and most bitterly deplored. The wise and good old friar thought indeed, that

"this alliance might so happy prove

To turn their households' rancour to pure love;"

but a Wiser than he knew that such deep-seated evils could not be cured by such gentle means; that a tempest of sorrow was required to awe, touch, and melt their proud, selfish hearts into gentleness and humility; and that nothing short of the most afflicting bereavement, together with the feeling that they had themselves produced and deserved it, could teach them rightly to "prize the breath they share with human kind,” and remand them to the impassioned attachments of nature. Accordingly the enmity of the rival houses is buried in the tomb of the faithful lovers; the strife that made their love fatal is shamed down by the love that makes their death beautiful; families are reconciled, society is