Her life cannot sustain the
violation of what she so clearly feels.
Shakspeare, too, saw that, in true love, as in fire, the utmost ardor
is coincident with the utmost purity. It is a true lover that exclaims
in the agony of Othello,
"If thou art false, O then Heaven mocks Itself!"
The son, framed, like Hamlet, to appreciate truth in all the beauty of
relations, sinks into deep melancholy when he finds his natural
expectations disappointed. He has no other. She to whom he gave the
name, disgraces from his heart's shrine all the sex.
"Frailty, thy name is Woman."
It is because a Hamlet could find cause to say so, that I have put the
line, whose stigma has never been removed, at the head of my work.
But, as a lover, surely Hamlet would not have so far mistaken, as to
have finished with such a conviction. He would have felt the faith of
Othello, and that faith could not, in his more dispassionate mind,
have been disturbed by calumny.
In Spain, this thought is arrayed in a sublimity which belongs to the
sombre and passionate genius of the nation. Calderon's Justina resists
all the temptation of the Demon, and raises her lover, with her, above
the sweet lures of mere temporal happiness.
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