"'Twas one that lov'd me better than you will,
But now you have it, take it."
Here we find consciousness of her own feminine levity, looked upon not merely as a natural force dragging her after it, but almost as a right, as the exercise of a mission or vocation. Cressida can even be sentimental, as she abandons herself to another!
"Troilus farewell, one eye yet looks on thee;
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah! poor our sex!"
Troilus is meanwhile indignant, not from a sense of injured morality, for that sort of love does not admit of such a thing: he is mad with masculine jealousy. "Was Cressida here?" ... and further on: "Nothing at all, unless that they were she ..."
The figures of Ferdinand and Miranda bring us back to love, youthful and pure, all the more pure, because it reveals itself, not in the midst of a great court or city, but in a desert island. The young man comes there ship-wrecked, cut off from the world that once was his, born as it were anew; the maiden has been brought up in solitude. Yet her love is awakened at first sight, in the beautiful phrase of Marlowe, which Shakespeare was so fond of quoting: "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" It is love, law of beings as of things, which returns eternally new and fresh as the dawn, making his Goddess appear to the youth, her God to the maiden, each to each as beings without their equal upon earth:
"I might call him
A thing divine, for nothing natural
I ever saw so noble." "Most sure, the goddess,
On whom these airs attend," says Ferdinand.
The choice is soon made, firm, resolute and determined. When Prospero tells her that there are men in the world, compared with whom, the youth she admires would seem a monster, Miranda replies:
"My affections
Are then most humble; I have no ambition
To see a goodlier man."