Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/456

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440
SHAKESPEARE'S MAIDENS AND WOMEN.

kind, could only develop its highest ideality as the flower of an unpolluted soil which only the feet of spirits had trodden. Ariel's melodies have trained her heart, and sensuality has never been known to her, save in the horribly hideous form of a Caliban. The love which Ferdinand awakes in her is therefore not really naïve but of a happy true-heartedness, of an early-world-like, almost terrible purity. Juliet's love shows like her age and all around her, a more romantic-mediæval character, and one blooming into the Reenaissance: it glitters in colours like the court of the Scaligeri, and yet is strong as of those noble races of Lombardy which were rejuvenated with German blood and loved as strongly as they hated. Juliet represents the love of a youthful, rather rough, but of an unspoiled and fresh era. She is entirely inspired with the sensuous glow and strength of belief of such a time, and even the cold decay of the burial vault can neither shake her faith nor cool her flame. Our Cleopatra!—ah, she sets forth the love of a sickly civilisation—an age whose beauty is faded, whose locks are curled with the utmost art, anointed with all pleasant perfumes, but in which many a grey hair may be seen, a time which will empty the cup held out to it all the more hastily because it is full of dregs. This love is without faith or truth, but for all that none the less wild or glowing. In the vexed consciousness that this heat is not to be