"O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!" that in the course of revision he must needs place in Juliet's mouth these quite analogous ejaculations (iii. 2):-- "Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical! Dove-feather'd raven! wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of divinest show!" Romeo in the old text indulges in this deplorably affected outburst (i. 2):-- "When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires; And these, who, often drown'd, could never die, Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars." In the old text, too, we find the barbarously tasteless speech in which Romeo, in his despair, envies the fly which is free to kiss Juliet's hand (iii. 2):-- "More validity, More honourable state, more courtship lives In carrion flies, than Romeo: they may seize On the white wonder of dear Juliet's hand, And steal immortal blessing from her lips; Who, even in pure and vestal modesty, Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin; But Romeo may not; he is banished. Flies may do this, but I from this must fly: They are free men, but I am banished." It is astonishing to come upon these lapses of taste, which are not surpassed by any of the absurdities in which the French _Précieuses Ridicules_ of the next century delighted, side by side with outbursts of the most exquisite lyric poetry, the most brilliant wit, and the purest pathos to be found in the literature of any country or of any age. _Romeo and Juliet_ is perhaps not such a flawless work of art as _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. It is not so delicately, so absolutely harmonious. But it is an achievement of much greater significance and moment; it is the great and typical love-tragedy of the world. It soars immeasurably above all later attempts to approach it. The Danish critic who should mention such a tragedy as _Axel and Valborg_ in the same breath with this play would show more patriotism than artistic sense. Beautiful as Oehlenschläger's drama is, the very nature of its theme forbids us to compare it with Shakespeare's. It celebrates constancy rather than love; it is a poem of tender emotions, of womanly magnanimity and chivalrous virtue, at war with passion and malignity. It is not, like _Romeo and Juliet_, at once the pæan and the dirge of passion. _Romeo and Juliet_ is the drama of youthful and impulsive love-at-first-sight, so passionate that it bursts every barrier in its path, so determined that it knows no middle way between happiness and death, so strong that it throws the lovers into each other's arms with scarcely a moment's pause, and, lastly, so ill-fated that death follows straightway upon the ecstasy of union.