"Take The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, Or Cytherea's breath;... ... bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial,"
have been plied with guano, dosed with new-fangled liquid manures, till their cosmetic and perfume announce a kind of harlotry: we ogle, sigh, languishingly sniff, and die of a rose in a rheumatic pain.
The gamut of feeling among Shakspeare's women is the clear and perfect octave which built the English glee and madrigal, whose untutored music was "the food of love." And love was entirely welcome, like the daylight; not put off and played with as if by the effeminacies of some Asiatic musical scale, whose eighth and quarter tones cannot be distinguished by a well modulated ear.
"What is Love? 'tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What's to come is still unsure; In delay there lies no plenty: Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth's a stuff will not endure."
Does this have a crude ring of the bivouac to any ear which has been accustomed to the macaronic variations of modern artists, who torture the great theme and force its simple blitheness through the brass crooks of a keyed cornet? 'Tis an honest love whose month is ever May, when the pipe of Pan is breathed upon by the clear west wind through the budding willows. Nothing competes with it but the throstle and song-sparrow: they seem to be weaving sacred nests out of the tones, to gather them into domestic privacy. Climb, count with delight the jealously guarded eggs, and do not blow them for your cabinet.
Nature was so prodigal of health to Shakspeare's women that it overflowed the clay banks of their bodies, and spread in a freshet of gayety. Beatrice and Rosalind never tire of keeping in the air the light shuttlecock of their wit. It floats in an æther of animal spirits; and, if it now and then touches earth, Nature promptly lends it a rebound. They engage in a masked revel to conceal their emotions. Will Orlando and Benedick penetrate the disguise and claim the lips that mockingly escape thus? If these women suspect their hearts to be distilling a sigh, laughter sparkles into the recess and exposes the illicit business. It is just like the men to roam about in disordered attire, with blue, inclement features, shaking with the "quotidian-tertian" of their love-turn. If they do not go about thus, it is all the same: then they are rallied for not being in Cupid's fashion. "Your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation." The gladness of these women would be cautioned at the lorn sight to defend themselves from infection.