She is still a woman to the core of her beauty-loving heart. Coming home from the great scene in Venice, where she baffles Shylock, and swamps with sudden justice the scales that were so eager for the bonded flesh, she loiters in the moonlight, marks the music which is floating from her palace to be caressed by the night and made sweeter than by day. Her listening ear is modulated by all the tenderness she feels and the love she expects; so she gives the music the color of a soul that has come home to wife and motherhood, till her thoughts put such a strain upon the vibrating strings that they grow too tense, and threaten to divulge her delicate secret. So she cries,—
"Peace! Now the moon sleeps with Endymion,
And would not be awak'd."
Her graceful passion takes shelter in the old myth whose names personify her thought. And her style of speaking reminds us of the more polished ladies of Shakspeare's time, who delighted in the masques and revels in which the persons of the old mythology were charged to utter gallant sentiments. She is a woman of Juliet's clime, and not without her frankness; but she has been brought up in England, and her feeling and her judgment are English through and through.
She has been forbidden by her father's testament to make free choice of the man whom she will love. But she could as soon be divested of her intellect as of her power and wish to love. There is not a single drop running through all her fairness that has caught a chill from the quarter of her brain where wit and wisdom ponder in their clear north light. Her mind is strong, but not the mind of a man, and with no traits more masculine than her frame itself, which is love's solicitor:—
"Here are sever'd lips,
Parted with sugar breath."
And even in her strict speech to Shylock we can feel the light draught of it, tempering the inclemency of her superb and unexpected threat: the Jew quails under the sentences which rain on him, golden, grave, serene. And they compel us to observe that pure sex has given the pitch to her strong, fatal wisdom. We cannot detect any thin and stridulous quality, like that of the well-gristled Duchess of Gloster, who repaid a box of the ear with these two lines:—
"Could I come near your beauty with my nails,
I'd set my ten commandments in your face."
If among the points of a well-nurtured woman there be those that are feline, they are generally retracted into velvet sheaths, and scarce surmised to be there till a scratch is made so silently that you have no evidence of it but your blood. But if Old Probabilities should overhear a woman blustering in a fashion as follows,—