"Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take—all myself!"
The grace and abandon in the manner, and the softness of accent, which imparted a new and charming effect to this passage, cannot be expressed in words; and it was so delicately touched, and so transitory,—so dependent, like a beautiful chord in music, on that which prepared and followed it, that it was found impossible to seize and fix it in a drawing.
From the first scene with the nurse, two drawings have been made. The idea of Juliet discovered as the curtain rises, gazing from the window, and watching for the return of her confidante, is perfectly new. The attitude (or more properly, one of her attitudes, for they are various as they are graceful and appropriate) is given in the seventh sketch, and the artist has conveyed it with peculiar grace and truth. The action chosen for the eighth drawing occurs immediately after Juliet's little moment of petulance, (so justly provoked,) and before she utters in a caressing tone, "Come, what says Romeo?" The first speech in this scene,
"O, she is lame! love's heralds should be thoughts,
Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams,
Driving back shadows over low'ring hills:
Therefore do nimble-pinion'd doves draw love,