Here, not only the feeling itself, born of the elastic and sanguine spirit which had never been touched by grief, but the images in which it comes arrayed to her fancy,--the bridegroom waked by music on his wedding-morn,--the new-crowned monarch,--the comparison of Bassanio to the young Alcides, and of herself to the daughter of Laomedon,--are all precisely what would have suggested themselves to the fine poetical imagination of Portia in such a moment. Her passionate exclamations of delight, when Bassanio has fixed on the right casket, are as strong as though she had despaired before. Fear and doubt she could repel; the native elasticity of her mind bore up against them; yet she makes us feel, that, as the sudden joy overpowers her almost to fainting, the disappointment would as certainly have killed her. How all the other passions fleet to air, As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair, And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy? O love! be moderate, allay thy ecstasy; In measure rain thy joy scant this excess; I feel too much thy blessing: make it less, For fear I surfeit! Her subsequent surrender of herself in heart and soul, of her maiden freedom, and her vast possessions, can never be read without deep emotions; for not only all the tenderness and delicacy of a devoted woman, are here blended with all the dignity which becomes the princely heiress of Belmont, but the serious, measured self-possession of her address to her lover, when all suspense is over, and all concealment superfluous, is most beautifully consistent with the character. It is, in truth, an awful moment, that in which a gifted woman first discovers, that besides talents and powers, she has also passions and affections; when she first begins to suspect their vast importance in the sum of her existence; when she first confesses that her happiness is no longer in her own keeping, but is surrendered forever and forever into the dominion of another! The possession of uncommon powers of mind are so far from affording relief or resource in the first intoxicating surprise--I had almost said terror--of such a revolution, that they render it more intense. The sources of thought multiply beyond calculation the sources of feeling; and mingled, they rush together, a torrent deep as strong. Because Portia is endued with that enlarged comprehension which looks before and after, she does not feel the less, but the more: because from the height of her commanding intellect she can contemplate the force, the tendency, the consequences of her own sentiments--because she is fully sensible of her own situation, and the value of all she concedes--the concession is not made with less entireness and devotion of heart, less confidence in the truth and worth of her lover, than when Juliet, in a similar moment, but without any such intrusive reflections--any check but the instinctive delicacy of