Shakespeare now enters upon the stage in his career in which his wit and brilliancy of spirit reach a perfection hitherto unattained. It seems as though these years of his life had been bathed in sunshine. They certainly cannot have been years of struggle, and still less of sorrow; there must have been a sort of lull in his existence--a tranquil zone, as it were, in the troubled waters of life. He seems for a short time to have revelled in his own genius with a sort of pensive happiness, to have drunk exhilarating draughts of his own inspiration. He heard the nightingales warbling in the sacred grove of his spirit. His whole nature burst into flower. In the Republican Calendar one of the months was named Floreal. There is such a flower-month in almost every human life; and this is Shakespeare's. He was doubtless in love at this time--as he had probably been all his life through--but his love was not an overmastering passion like Romeo's, nor did it depress him with that half-despairing feeling of the unworthiness of its object which he betrays in his Sonnets; nor, again, was it the airy ecstasy of youthful imagination that ran riot in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. No, it was a happy love, which filled his head as well as his heart, accompanied with joyous admiration for the wit and vivacity of the beloved one, for her graciousness and distinction. Her coquetry is gay, her heart is excellent, and her intelligence so quick that she seems to be wit incarnate in the form of a woman. In his early years he had presented not a few unamiable, mannish women in his comedies, and not a few ambitious, bloodthirsty, or corrupt women in his serious plays--figures such as Adriana and the shrewish Katharine on the one hand, Tamora and Margaret of Anjou on the other hand, who have all a stiff-necked will, and a certain violence of manners. In the later years of his ripe manhood he displays a preference for young women who are nothing but soul and tenderness, silent natures without wit or sparkle, figures such as Ophelia, Desdemona, and Cordelia. Between these two strongly-marked groups we come upon a bevy of beautiful young women, who all have their heart in the right place, but whose chief attraction lies in their sparkling quickness of wit. They are often as lovable as the most faithful friend can be, and witty as Heinrich Heine himself, though with another sort of wit. We feel that Shakespeare must have admired with all his heart the models from whom he drew these women, and must have rejoiced in them as one brilliant mind rejoices in another. These types of delicate and aristocratic womanhood cannot possibly have had plebeian models.