An emotion far shallower than this is quite enough in any age to trump up a marriage with; but it is a funeral bak'd meat growing colder still at the wedding-breakfast. It is often frozen stiff before it gets there. Half-ripened girls fancy that their simmering preference will have the sun-burst of love; but the blossom is still in its sheath: when it matures, that first greenness is pushed off. But, if it was rubbed off, the blossom, exposed to unseasonable air, grows rusty, and lifts up a vapid invitation to some splendor to nod and mingle sweets. Shakspeare has no language of conventional avowal: no acceptances that are inspired by respect, calculation, immaturity, acquaintanceship, water his page with insipidity. His pen is love's shaft, and always has somebody's blood upon the tip.

So do not include Portia's sublime deference in your modern programme of reform. Man would grow less worthy of woman, less obedient to her inspirations, if that fell into disrepute. It is the first unstudied stratagem of love,—one that so humbles man into a greater deference that she can no longer call him lord. She listens in turn to his emotion: every line lifts her into equality, with the gesture that kings make when they acknowledge:—

"Madam, you have bereft me of all words,
Only my blood speaks to you in my veins;
And there is such confusion in my powers,
As after some oration, fairly spoke
By a beloved prince, there doth appear
Among the buzzing pleased multitude;
Where every something, being blent together,
Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,
Express'd, and not express'd."

This is the quality in Shakspeare's courtships which convinces us that all his marriages will turn out happily. And he makes it plain in all his plays that he is a devotee of marriage. Portia is quite competent to lead a single life, and might earn a brilliant living if fate stripped her of wealth. Being without a particle of ambition, she would have to be driven by poverty into setting up housekeeping with her gifts. But no woman is fine enough to persuade Nature to grant her exemption from the pain of love. There will always be exceptions,—an Olympia Morata, a Cassandra Fédélé, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Maria Mitchell, Clara Barton,—natures of great constancy, who are absorbed in scholarship, poesy, or good works, with a temperament that has an even graciousness toward all men, and just pauses short of honoring one exclusively. Or, perhaps, the genius of such women was the gradual rally of time around an early disappointment, whose story never will be told, when something baffled a first love,—as the pearl-oyster, stimulated by some foreign substance that has intruded into its retreat, slowly coats it all over with nacre, till beauty incorporates the secret ill. Man covets it, but can never fix the date when the trouble of a fine soul began to revenge itself so nobly.

Still, it gives us pleasure when the best gifts are surprised, captured, seized away to consecrate privacy and become a fount of noble inheritance. Their publicity shall thrill and elevate a later age.

"When virtue leaps high in the public fountain, you seek for the lofty spring of nobleness, and find it far off in the dear breast of some mother, who melted the snows of winter, and condensed the summer's dew into fair, sweet humanity, which now gladdens the face of man in all the city streets."

Or if, in middle life, some truth, some moral, claims a woman's hand, and offers second marriage, men will gladly listen to a tone whose grave, sweet temper, pitched by first love and married happiness, pervades all her experience.

So Portia, who could, when it was needed, "turn two mincing steps into a manly stride," doffs the lawyer's robe, and, returning, is met by music and conducted to a palace that was not till then a home.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] Sometimes in Shakspeare the word fancy means a genuine passion: here it hints only at a passing sentiment.