"That sport best pleases, that doth least know how: Where zeal strives to content, and the contents Die in the zeal of them which it presents, Their form confounded makes most form in mirth; When great things labouring perish in their birth." Nevertheless, there is here a certain youthful cruelty in the courtiers' ridicule of the actors, whereas in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ everything passes off in the purest, airiest humour. What can be more perfect, for example, than the Lion's reassuring address to the ladies?-- "'You, ladies, you, whose gentle hearts do fear The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor May now, perchance, both quake and tremble here, When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar. Then know, that I, one Snug the joiner, am No lion fell, nor else no lion's dam; For, if I should as lion come in strife Into this place, 't were pity on my life.'" And how pleasant, when he at last comes in with his roar, is Demetrius' comment, of proverbial fame, "Well roared, lion!" It is true that _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ is rather to be described as a dramatic lyric than a drama in the strict sense of the word. It is a lightly-flowing, sportive, lyrical fantasy, dealing with love as a dream, a fever, an illusion, an infatuation, and making merry, in especial, with the irrational nature of the instinct. That is why Lysander, turning, under the influence of the magic flower, from Hermia, whom he loves, to Helena, who is nothing to him, but whom he now imagines that he adores, is made to exclaim (ii. 3):-- "The will of man is by his reason sway'd, And reason says you are the worthier maid." Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the poet's irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an expression of human reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is only by way of exception that he makes reason the determining factor in human conduct. He early felt and divined how much wider is the domain of the unconscious than of the conscious life, and saw that our moods and passions have their root in the unconscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are latent in the wayward love-scenes of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. And it is now that Shakespeare, on the farther limit of early youth, and immediately after writing _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, for the second time takes the most potent of youthful emotions as his theme, and treats it no longer as a thing of fantasy, but as a matter of the deadliest moment, as a glowing, entrancing, and annihilating passion, the source of bliss and agony, of life and death. It is now that he writes his first independent tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_, that unique, imperishable love-poem, which remains to this day one of the loftiest summits of the world's literature. As _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ is the triumph of grace, so _Romeo and Juliet_ is the apotheosis of pure passion.