such as a bubble drops on the bed of a clear brook; but it goes athwart his eyes. As they look whence it came, he sees it has already pulled down the lids of hers and set them for a snare. She has spoken: she has made a declaration. With all the enterprise of Helena, she could not have advertised herself more fully.
There are many dialects and methods of expression; and every woman will instinctively pronounce her mother-tongue. From Viola to Helena stretches a whole chromatic scale of tones which do not transcend the holding bars. Helena was not a type anticipating some future of an inverted relation of the sexes, when, perhaps, even seven women might have Scripture for laying hold of one man. But she bravely testifies of woman the faculty of a love so sacred, and improvised by a heart so firm and true, so inspired with its own destiny, that she perceives through a man's indifference what a man so often perceives through hers, through a firmament barred by sullen cloud-racks, the clear heaven that will be corresponsive to the heart. Helena cannot be daunted by the weather. While the storm lasts, the upper blue is confided to her keeping against the next fine day. But we shall see Ophelia cower beneath the broken roof of reason, while the heart is too weak to shore it up against the wild pother that is breaking round her.
OPHELIA.
Looking across the intervale of our prosaic concerns, we descry the outlines of Hamlet, as they build on the
