I remember, when I was in Italy, standing "at evening on the top of Fiesole," and at my feet I beheld the city of Florence and the Val d'Arno, with its villas, its luxuriant gardens, groves, and olive grounds, all bathed in crimson light. A transparent vapor or exhalation, which in its tint was almost as rich as the pomegranate flower, moving with soft undulation, rolled through the valley, and the very earth seemed to pant with warm life beneath its rosy veil. A dark purple shade, the forerunner of night, was already stealing over the east; in the western sky still lingered the blaze of the sunset, while the faint perfume of trees, and flowers, and now and then a strain of music wafted upwards, completed the intoxication of the senses. But I looked from the earth to the sky, and immediately above this scene hung the soft crescent moon—alone, with all the bright heaven to herself; and as that sweet moon to the glowing landscape beneath it, such is the character of Miranda compared to that of Juliet.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Lord Byron remarked of the Italian women, (and he could speak avec connaissance de fait,) that they are the only women in the world capable of impressions, at once very sudden and very durable; which, he adds, is to be found in no other nation. Mr. Moore observes afterwards, how completely an Italian woman, either from nature or her social position, is led to invert the usual course of frailty among ourselves, and, weak in resisting the first impulses of passion, to reserve the whole strength of her character for a display of constancy and devotedness afterwards.—Both these traits of national character are exemplified in Juliet—Moore's Life of Byron, vol. ii. pp. 303, 338. 4to edit.
[18] La sève de la vie, is an expression used somewhere by Madame de Staël.
[19] Characters of Shakspeare's Plays.
[20] I must allude, but with reluctance, to another character, which I have heard likened to Juliet, and often quoted as the heroine par excellence of amatory fiction—I mean the Julie of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse; I protest against her altogether. As a creation of fancy the portrait is a compound of the most gross and glaring inconsistencies; as false and impossible to the reflecting and philosophical mind, as the fabled Syrens, Hamatryads and Centaurs to the eye of the anatomist. As a woman, Julie belongs neither to nature nor to artificial society; and if the pages of melting and dazzling eloquence in which Rousseau has garnished out his idol did not blind and intoxicate us, as the incense and the garlands did the votaries of Isis, we should be disgusted. Rousseau, having composed his Julie of the commonest clay of the earth, does not animate her with fire from heaven, but breathes his own spirit into her, and then calls the "impetticoated" paradox a woman. He makes her a peg on which to hang his own visions and sentiments—and what sentiments! but that I fear to soil my pages, I would pick out a few of them, and show the difference between this strange combination of youth and innocence, philosophy and pedantry, sophistical prudery, and detestable grossièreté, and our own Juliet. No! if we seek a French Juliet, we must go far—far back to the real Héloïse, to her eloquence, her sensibility, her fervor of passion, her devotedness of truth. She, at least, married the man she loved, and loved the man she married, and more than died for him; but enough of both.
[21] Constant describes her beautifully—"Sa voix si douce au travers le bruit des armes, sa forme délicate au milieu de cet hommes tous couverts de fer, la pureté de son âme opposée leurs calculs avides, son calme céleste qui contraste avec leurs agitations, remplissent le spectateur d'une émotion constante et mélancolique, telle que ne la fait ressentir nulle tragédie ordinaire."
[22] Coleridge—preface to Wallenstein.
[23] In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona."
[24] There is an allusion to this court language of love in "All Well that Ends Well," where Helena says,—