There is nothing but the mask of night upon Juliet's face to hide, the
blush which her lips acknowledge. "Farewell compliment. Dost thou love
me?" The bud of love becomes a beauteous flower in its first spring
day, for it is too impatient to levy on the lagging warmth of summer;
and the sudden heat sends every drop of Juliet's blood rushing into
the frankest words that maiden ever spoke. She has not even mental
device enough to hush what the most passionate women, of a type less
frigid than our own, are quite content to feel if there's love enough
to justify. So the verses which come fluent from Juliet's lips do not
scald like the insinuations of some modern novels which plot random
passions and ingeniously dally with them. Shakspeare has no pages of
this elaborate suggestion. His mental style was like the archer's bolt
that quivers in the middle of the boss: he never could have learned
this modern practice of the boomerang, which dips, skims, makes
ricochets, lingers, doubles corners, and plays back into the sender's
hand.
"A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid: love's night is noon."
The finest of his ladies cry out with the sudden smart.
"Cæsario, by the roses of the spring,
By maidhood, honor, truth, and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all my pride,
Nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide."
Perhaps this is not a style that might be safely cultivated in our
female boarding-schools, unless all the Cæsarios were Violas in
disguise. But it is Love's ideal sincerity as it lives in Poesy's world
to quicken sluggards and scorch prurience to death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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