Would never from my heart.
Milton.
I have this evening, while seated in my lonely chamber, ventured—not, I hope, with profane hands—to draw one inappreciable gem from out of the carcanet of each of the two unrivalled masters of the poetry of our language. I was curious to see the effect to be produced by a close juxtaposition of these two exquisite specimens of the soul’s light; of the revealment of its original genius; of the intense brilliancy of its Truth, falling as it does in one ray upon two objects so diverse in their character as the virgin love of the retired and comparatively humble but devoted Helena, and the married constancy of the Father of our race.
The effect reminds me of an échappée de lumière that I once beheld in the gallery of the Vatican, when a sudden emergence of light brightened with the same gleam the calm face of the Virgin of the clouds, (called di Foligno,) and at the same instant illuminated the whole principal figure in the Transfiguration of Raffaelle; floating as it does, and tending almost with a movement upward, in the air of ‘the high mountain’ where the miracle took place——as these two grand paintings then stood, side by side, in the solemn, in the holy quiet of that lofty and sequestered apartment. O moment! never to be forgotten, never to be obscured by any lapse of after time!
And thus, although in a less palpable world, do these two passages of immortal verse, wearing each its beam of golden light, stand in their effulgence before the sympathies of the observer alive to the charms and influences of moral beauty! Surely no other poet has the world produced comparable to Shakspeare for the revelation of the love of the yet unwedded girl; and who is there to be named with Milton, in the tenderness and truth with which he has touched upon conjugal relationship; and that necessity, that inappeasable requirement of intercommunion that accompanies, as its immediate consequence, the sacrament of the nuptial rite where there is destined to exist the real, the progressive, the indissoluble intermarriage of soul with soul!
How effectually and with what truth does the dramatic Bard raise the veil and exhibit to us the imagination of this retired girl, bred up in all the deep earnestness of mind that a country life and comparative seclusion could induce, dwelling and brooding over the form of one individual brought into intimate association with her, ‘seeing him every hour’ where she had little else to interest her, nor any thing to contemplate, but, as she says,
‘sit and draw
His archéd brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart’s table; heart too capable
Of every trick and line of his sweet favour.