If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully :
Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won,
I'll frown and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo ; but, else, not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond ;
And therefore thou mayst think my haviour light :
But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.
I should have been more strange, I must confess,
But that thou overheard'st, ere I was ware,
My true love's passion : therefore pardon me ;
And not impute this yielding to light love,
Which the dark night hath so discovered."[1]
In this paper there is a great relapse from excellence, so much so that it may be almost classed as a pure piéce de manufacture. The remarks on first love are merely a repetition of commonplaces which have been better uttered "many a time and oft" by others, and the actress princess, with her rouge and third-class lover, and Berlin dialect, is a careless repetition of the same simile, in almost the same words, in the comment on Constance. Heine assumes in these remarks that all men have their full mental development at the time of their first love, and that it is the same tremendous and overwhelming phase of passion in all, whereas in most cases it is true that no man ever became a fully developed lover, any more than a fully fledged criminal, all at once. For the development even of a critical taste in food and wines is a matter of education and
- ↑ Rome and Juliet, act ii. sc. 2.
