Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/233

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ROMANCE AND REALITY.
227

perfections had been the subject of their fireside talk—

'I have heard my father name him'—

cherishing the vision of her girlhood in silence and hopelessness. Viola seems to me the very poetry of love. Satisfactory as is the ending of Twelfth Night, I always feel a fanciful anxiety for the fate of her who is henceforth to be

'Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen.'

I have a great idea of a lover having some trouble,—it is the effort we make to attain an object that teaches us its value."

Edward Lorraine.—"I think you judge Juliet unfairly, because you judge her by rules to which she is not amenable—by those of our present time. You forget how differently love affairs are now arranged to what they were in the time of the fair Veronese. It was an age when love lived, as Byron says, more in the eyes than the heart. A kind wind blew back a veil, and showed a rose-touched cheek; or a dark eye flashed over a blind—this was enough to make an enamoured youth desperate. The lady herself just glanced over her lattice, and a stately step, or a well-mounted steed, hence-