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serve you

As I would do the gods. But oh, thou tyrant !

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all thy woes can stir; therefore, betake thee

To nothing but despair. A thousand knees,

Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting

Upon a barren mountain, and still winter,

In storm perpetual, could not move the gods

To look that way thou wert."

Leontes accepts his chastisement! Again he hears the piteous cry of his queen's broken heart, that cry which sleeping or waking will haunt him all his days. "Go on, go on!" he says,

"Thou canst not speak too much. I have deserv'd

All tongues to talk their bitterest."

Paulina sees the anguish of the bowed and hopelessly bereaved man. "He is touched," she says, "to the noble heart," and, the passion of her grief having found vent, there is now room for her womanly compassion to reassert itself.

"Sir, royal sir, forgive a foolish

woman!

The love I bore your queen-[here her tears choke her] lo, fool again !—

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beings under conditions which give scope for the play of character and passion. If he so draws them that his audience becomes absorbed in the interest of the action, if he makes them feel that what his characters say and do is true to nature, under the circumstances in which he has placed them, of what moment is it whether Bohemia has a sea-coast or not?

To this lonely spot Antigonus has come with his baby charge, accompanied by one of the sailors of the ship that has brought him from Sicily. A storm is rolling up. "In my conscience," says the sea

man,

"The heavens with what we have in hand are angry

And frown upon us.' ""

He goes away, urging Antigonus to make his best haste, and not to venture inland, for the place is haunted by beasts of prey. Left to himself, Antigonus gives the description of a dream, a passage which Milton must I think have had in his mind, when writing his sonnet "On his Deceased Wife." "Come, poor babe!" he says:

"I have heard, but not believ'd, the spirits of the dead

May walk again. If such thing be, thy

mother Appear'd to me last night; for ne'er was dream So like a waking.

To me comes a

creature, Sometimes her head on one side, some another;

I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
So fill'd, and so becoming: in pure
white robes

Like very sanctity she did approach
My cabin where I lay; 1 thrice bow'd

before me,

And, gasping to begin some speech,

her eyes

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Thy wife Paulina more!'
with shrieks
She melted into air."

A dream so vivid naturally makes Antigonus believe that Hermione is dead, and that he has been visited by her spirit. He will follow her behest to leave the child in Bohemia, all the more because he thinks now, contrary to all his previous convictions, that it

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enes," Apollo wills that it should being indeed the issue of Polixbe left "either for life or death, upon the earth of its right father." For this conclusion he is scarcely to be forgiven. But his tenderness for the child is very sweet and touching. His words, "Blossom, speed thee well!" show how the babe has wound itself about his heart. It is wrapped in a warm rich mantle, and he places in a bundle a paper with its name, Perdita, upon it, and a large sum in gold with some costly baby dresses,

"Which may, if fortune pleases, both breed thee pretty, And still rest thine.'

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1 "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
And vested all in white, pure as her mind."-MILTON.

charge when he has to fly, pursued by a bear, into whose deadly clutches he presently falls, while the ship that brought him to Bohemia founders in the storm.

This we learn from an old shepherd and his son, in a scene where Shakespeare exhibits delightfully his familiarity with the talk and ways of country folks of that class. The shepherd exclaims on finding the babe: "Mercy on's! a barne, a very pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one!" Clearly, he thinks it is of gentle birth, though he suspects not honestly come by. He is a kindly man. "I'll take it up for pity!" he says, and waits to open the bundle until his son joins him, bringing news of the death of Antigonus and the shipwreck of his companions. "Heavy matters!" he says, "heavy matters! But look thee here, boy-here's a sight for thee! Look thee, a bearing-cloth [a christening mantle] for a squire's child!" He tells his son to open the bundle

"So, let's see. It was told me I should be rich by the fairies. This is some changeling. What's within, boy? Clown. You're a made old man.

...

Gold, all gold!

Shep. This is fairy gold, boy, and 'twill prove so. Up with it, keep it close; home, home, the next way. We are lucky, boy, and to be so still requires nothing but secrecy."

And home he goes with his precious charge and the rich belongings, which are years after to be the means of proving Perdita's parentage, while his clownish, goodnatured son stays behind to bury so much of Antigonus as the bear has left. "That's a good deed," says his father; ""Tis a lucky day, and we'll do good deeds on't."

The poet had now to leap over an interval of sixteen years, a

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More than this he will not tell them. They are to "let Time's news be known when 'tis brought forth," and, having thus kindled the curiosity of the audience as to how Florizel and Perdita are to work out the conclusion of the sad events which have gone before, the Chorus retires.

By the conversation of Polixenes and Camillo in the next scene, they are early put in the way to hope that it will work out happily, through the loves of Florizel and Perdita. Camillo, full of homesickness, longs to go back to Sicily. Besides,"

" he says, "the king, my

master, has sent for me; to whose feeling sorrows I may be some allay, or I o'erween to think so, which is another spur to my departure." Camillo has proved himself so valuable, however, as councillor and statesman, that Polixenes cannot agree to part with him, and begs him to speak no more of "that fatal Sicilia, whose very naming punishes me with the remembrance of that penitent and reconciled king, my brother, whose loss of his most precious queen and children are even now to be afresh lamented." The conversation then turns to the subject of the king's son Florizel, who has of late been in the habit of absenting himself from Court. His movements have been watched, and a report brought

to Polixenes, "that he is seldom from the house of a most homely shepherd; a man, they say, that from very nothing, and beyond the imagination of his neighbours, is grown into an unspeakable estate." Camillo, too, has heard "of such a man, who hath a daughter of most rare note. The report of her is extended more than can be thought to begin from such a cottage." The matter is one which must be seen to, and Camillo agrees to go with Polixenes in disguise to the shepherd, from whom it is thought it will be easy to learn the reason of Florizel's frequent visits to his farm.

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We now see that the shepherd has acted in accordance with what he said of his good luck, that it "wanted nothing but secrecy.' He has kept his secret well, and so, too, have his wife, now dead, and his clownish son. Little by little he has made use of some of the gold he found with Perdita, managing it so as not to raise surmises among his neighbours, while growing by slow degrees into a well-to-do sheep-farmer. When we see him, he is keeping the festival of the sheep - shearing, which, it appears, he has celebrated handsomely for many years. He speaks of his wife's active part in these festivals in days gone by, and how pleasant is the picture! She is no Bohemian housewife, but a true English dame, such as Shakespeare had no doubt seen in many a country homestead

"When my old wife liv'd, upon This day she was both pantler, butler, cook,

Both dame and servant; welcom'd all, serv'd all;

Would sing her song, and dance her turn; now here,

At upper end of the table, now in the middle;

On his shoulder, and his; her face o' fire

With labour; and the thing she took to quench it,

She would to each one sip.” Such a woman, we may be sure, would be a good mother to the poor foundling so strangely cast upon her care. As the child grew older, these kindly folks would use the means which came with her to give her the best education that was to be had. By-and-by they would see something in her superior to the other country lassessomething that so commanded their respect and admiration, that she would be spared the rough work of their household and farm. She took, we see, her share of herding the sheep, and the lighter work of their simple home. But she would live the while in a world of observation, thought, and fancy, in which they had no share, and so she became in person and mind and manner such as we imagine Hermione to have been in her happy days of girlhood. Especial pains indeed seem to have been taken to make us see the mother in the child. Although placed amid surroundings so widely different, we can trace in her the same nature, the same gentle dignity of manner, the same thoughtful spirit, the same unstudied grace of movement, the same refined beauty of both face and form.

The

Well may Florizel "bless the time, when his good falcon made his flight across" the ground of the old shepherd's farm. moment his eye rests upon Perdita, he is drawn by an irresistible She is instinct towards her.

thenceforth the ruler of his life. He cannot be, to use his own words, "his own, nor anything to any, if he be not hers." Their story in this respect is like that of Ferdinand and Miranda in "The Tempest," and it is hard to say

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which of these tales of love at first sight Shakespeare has invested with the greater charm. From the first moment, we learn from Prospero, Ferdinand and Miranda are both in either's power." It is not so said expressly of Perdita, yet it was probably no less true of her than of her princely lover. Unlike Miranda, she had seen many men; but what a vision of noble manly beauty must Florizel have presented to her eyes! Being what he was in person and in mind, he must, in contrast with the rustics around her, have been as much a delightful revelation as Ferdinand was to Miranda, when, thinking him a being of another world, she calls him "a thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble." Such natures must have been quickly drawn together. It was impossible for Perdita, with her inborn sympathies with all that was refined and noble, to withhold her heart from one in every way fitted to awake the slumbering soul within her, touched, as she must have been, to find herself approached with reverential homage by one so different from all her eyes had ever seen. From the first he has made no secret of his royal blood; but, come what may, she is to be his queen. Perdita, who believes the shepherd to be her father, though dwelling more than her lover upon their difference in rank, and apprehensive that this must disunite them, yet cannot in her frank simplicity hide from him that their love is mutual.

At every successive meeting he finds fresh graces in her. He sees that in spite of her superior beauty her companions are not envious. Their submission to her sway, the influence of native dignity,is involuntary. She is as unconscious of it as they are. She is

chosen by them as their queen in all their sports, and with most queenly graciousness she distributes her flowers and other simple favours among them, Florizel watching her every movement. He is as much amazed as attracted by the poetic turn of her thoughts, by the way she gives expression to them, by the wisdom, the winning humility of a creature who, in all she does and says, fascinates him with sweet surprises. In her soft voice, her words, her mien, there is something that speaks unmistakably of the royal blood within her. This it is left to the impersonator of Perdita to suggest. The audience should be made to feel as well as see the princess. Florizel does so; and hence it is that not his heart only is enthralled, but his judgment also-nay, his whole being. He is her subject, and she his queen-elect, worthy, most worthy, to share his present state and future royalty, and to do grace and honour to them both.

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