An image more majestic, more wonderfully sublime, was never presented to the fancy; yet almost equal as a flight of poetry is her apostrophe to the heavens;-- Arm, arm, ye heavens, against these perjured kings A widow calls!--be husband to me, heavens! And again-- O that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth, Then with a passion would I shake the world! Not only do her thoughts start into images, but her feelings become persons: grief haunts her as a living presence: Grief fills the room up of my absent child; Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me; Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then have I reason to be fond of grief. And death is welcomed as a bridegroom; she sees the visionary monster as Juliet _saw_ "the bloody Tybalt festering in his shroud," and heaps one ghastly image upon another with all the wild luxuriance of a distempered fancy:-- O amiable, lovely death! Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness! Arise forth from the couch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones; And put my eye-balls in thy vaulty brows; And right these fingers with thy household worms; And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust; And be a carrion monster like thyself; Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smil'st, And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love, O come to me! Constance, who is a majestic being, is majestic in her very frenzy. Majesty is also the characteristic of Hermione: but what a difference between _her_ silent, lofty, uncomplaining despair, and the eloquent grief of Constance, whose wild lamentations, which come bursting forth clothed in the grandest, the most poetical imagery, not only melt, but absolutely electrify us! On the whole, it may be said that pride and maternal affection form the basis of the character of Constance, as it is exhibited to us; but that these passions, in an equal degree common to many human beings, assume their peculiar and individual tinge from an extraordinary development of intellect and fancy. It is the energy of passion which lends the character its concentrated power, as it is the prevalence of imagination throughout which dilates it into magnificence. Some of the most splendid poetry to be met with in Shakspeare, may be found in the parts of Juliet and Constance; the most splendid, perhaps, excepting only the parts of Lear and Othello; and for the same reason,--that Lear and Othello as men, and Juliet and Constance as women, are distinguished by the predominance of the same faculties,--passion and imagination.