who has given us the catastrophe of Othello and the tempest scene in Lear might also have adopted these additional circumstances of horror in the fate of the lovers, and have so treated them as to harrow up our very soul, had it been his object to do so? But apparently it was not. The tale is one,

"Such as, once heard, in gentle heart destroys

All pain but pity."

It is in truth a tale of love and sorrow, not of anguish and terror. We behold the catastrophe afar off, with scarcely a wish to avert it. Romeo and Juliet must die; their destiny is fulfilled; they have quaffed off the cup of life, with all its infinite of joys and agonies, in one intoxicating draught. What have they to do more upon this earth? Young, innocent, loving, and beloved, they descend together into the tomb; but Shakespeare has made that tomb a shrine of martyred and sainted affection consecrated for the worship of all hearts, not a dark charnel vault, haunted by spectres of pain, rage, and desperation. Romeo and Juliet are pictured lovely in death as in life; the sympathy they inspire does not oppress us with that suffocating sense of horror which in the altered tragedy makes the fall of the curtain a relief; but all pain is lost in the tenderness and poetic beauty of the picture. Romeo's last speech over his bride is not like the raving of a disappointed boy; in its deep pathos, its rapturous despair, its glowing imagery, there is the very luxury of life and love. Juliet, who had drunk off the sleeping potion in a fit of frenzy, wakes calm and collected:

"I do remember well where I should be,

And there I am. Where is my Romeo?"

The profound slumber in which fer senses have been steeped for so many hours has tranquillized her nerves and stilled the fever in her blood; she wakes "like a sweet child who has been dreaming of something promised to it by its mother," and opens her eyes to ask for it :

"Where is my Romeo?"

She is answered at once,·

"Thy husband in thy bosom here lies dead."

This is enough she sees at once the whole horror of her situation,- she sees it with a quiet and resolved despair; she utters no reproach against the Friar, makes no inquiries, no complaints, except that affecting remonstrance, ·

"O churl! drink all, and leave no friendly drop

To help me after!"

All that is left to her is to die, and she dies. The poem, which opened with the enmity of the two families, closes with their reconciliation over the breathless remains of their children; and no violent, frightful, or discordant feeling is suffered to mingle with that soft impression of melancholy left within the heart, and which Schlegel compares to one long, endless sigh.

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A youthful passion," says Goethe (alluding to one of his own early attachments), "which is conceived and cherished without any certain object, may be compared to a shell thrown from a mortar by night : it rises calmly in a brilliant track, and seems to mix, and even to dwell for a moment, with the stars of heaven; but at length it falls,—it bursts, — consuming and destroying all around, even as itself expires."

To conclude: love, considered under its poetical as

pect, is the union of passion and imagination, and, accordingly, to one of these, or to both, all the qualities of Juliet's mind and heart (unfolding and varying as the action of the drama proceeds) may be finally traced: the former concentrating all those natural impulses, fervent affections, and high energies which lend the character its internal charm, its moral power and individual interest; the latter diverging from all those splendid and luxuriant accompaniments which invest it with its external glow, its beauty, its vigor, its freshness, and its truth.

With all this immense capacity of affection and imagination, there is a deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and education; and the action of the drama, while it serves to develop the character, appears but its natural and necessary result. "Le mystère de l'existence," said Madame de Staël to her daughter, "c'est le rapport de nos erreurs avec nos peines."

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

BY WILLIAM HURRELL MALLOCK.

HE apostles of modern progress claim many virtues for the present, which the unenlightened observer may be somewhat slow to detect in it. But it has one distinctive feature, at any rate, the reality of which can be denied by nobody, and which has needed but little heightening from the imagination of the optimist. That feature is the singular toleration of its temper amongst all that, apparently, can most excite intolerance. Every belief that life was once supposed to rest upon we see men calmly questioning and preparing to cast aside, and yet we most of us keep our tempers; we are neither afraid nor angry. Doctrines are swinging before us in the balance that seemed but yesterday to be fixed as mountains, not to be weighed at all; and yet no Brennus adds a sword to make his own scale heavier. There is, in fact, a greater intellectual struggle going on now about us than the world in its whole history has ever before witnessed; the difference that is at the heart of it is wider and more profound. And yet never in any past period has the philosophic and the theological hatred been felt so little, or been so well suppressed by the disputants; while amongst the world at large, that intelligently

watches the movement, and with interest abides the result of it, prejudice seems almost completely to be laid to sleep, and to have given place to a true judicial calm. Our avowed desire is simply to discover where truth lies, not to discover that it lies either here or there. Truth is the pearl we want, and the divers may seek for it either in cess-pools or in crystal seas. Let them only prove to us satisfactorily where it is to be found. It is not by its locality that we shall judge of its value.

A toleration so catholic and so complete as this seems doubtless a very attractive thing, and is hailed by many wise and worthy men as the fairest and surest sign of a really enlightened age. It is to be feared, however, that in this view we flatter ourselves too much. In some small measure our toleration may indeed be a sign of our enlightenment, but in a far greater measure it is a sign and an effect of our ignorance. We are tolerant of various views, because we have grasped the full meaning of none of them. We are calm as we watch the battle, because we are happily unconscious of what hangs on the issue of it.

This unconsciousness is as easy to explain as it is difficult to excuse. It lies in the following fact. The seat of war, so to speak, is at present in a distant country. Our homes, our families, and the course of our daily lives are not disturbed by it. The questions now dividing the intellectual world are as yet unpractical and remote ones. They deal with the most distant things of the past, or the most elusive things of the present, with the connection of mind and body, with the foundations of morality, with the descent of man, with the origin of life, with the composition of matter,