"_Juliet_. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day: It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear; Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree: Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. _Romeo_. It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east." Romeo is a well-born youth, richly endowed by nature, enthusiastic and reserved. At the beginning of the play we find him indifferent as to the family feud, and absorbed in his hopeless fancy for a lady of the hostile house, Capulet's fair niece, Rosaline, whom Mercutio describes as a pale wench with black eyes. The Rosaline of _Love's Labour's Lost_ is also described by Biron, at the end of the third act, as "A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes," so that the two namesakes may not improbably have had a common model. Shakespeare has retained this first passing fancy of Romeo's, which he found in his sources, because he knew that the heart is never more disposed to yield to a new love than when it is bleeding from an old wound, and because this early feeling already shows Romeo as inclined to idolatry and self-absorption. The young Italian, even before he has seen the woman who is to be his fate, is reticent and melancholy, full of tender longings and forebodings of evil. Then he is seized as though with an overwhelming ecstasy at the first glimpse of Rosaline's girl-kinswoman. Romeo's character is less resolute than Juliet's; passion ravages it more fiercely; he, as a youth, has less control over himself than she as a maiden. But none the less is his whole nature elevated and beautified by his relation to her. He finds expressions for his love for Juliet quite different from those he had used in the case of Rosaline. There occur, indeed, in the balcony scene, one or two outbursts of the extravagance so natural to the rhetoric of young love. The envious moon is sick and pale with grief because Juliet is so much more fair than she; two of the fairest stars, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return. But side by side with these conceits we find immortal lines, the most exquisite words of love that ever were penned:-- "With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls; For stony limits cannot hold love out ..." or-- "It is my soul that calls upon my name: How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears!" His every word is steeped in a sensuous-spiritual ecstasy.