"The will of man is by his _reason_ sway'd; And _reason says_ you are the _worthier_ maid."
Yet the individual reality of the figures appears through this exquisite version of the eternal comedy, as though to remind us that they really belong to life. Helena follows the man she loves, but who does not love her, like a lapdog, which, the more it is beaten, the more it runs round and round its master; she trembles at the outbreak of furious jealousy in her little friend Hermia, who threatens to put out her eyes, believing her to be capable of it, when she remembers the time when they were at school together:
"O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd! She was a vixen when she went to school: And though she be but little she is fierce."
When we read _Romeo and Juliet,_ after the _Dream,_ we seem not to have left that poetical environment, to which Mercutio expressly recalls us, with his fantastic embroidery around Queen Mab, above all, when we consider the style, the rhyming and the general physiognomy of the little story. All have inclined to suave and gentle speech and metaphor, when speaking of _Romeo and Juliet._ For Schlegel it was scented with "the perfumes of springtide, the song of the nightingales, the freshness of a newly budded rose." Hegel too found himself face to face with that rose: "sweet rose in the valley of the world, torn asunder by the rude tempest and the hurricane." Coleridge too speaks of that sense of spring: "The spring with its odours, its flowers and its fleetingness." All have looked upon it as the poem of youthful love and have remarked that the play reaches its acme in the two love scenes in the garden at night, and in the departure after the nuptial night, in which some have seen the renovation of the traditional forms of love poetry, "the epithalamium," "the dawn." This play is not only closely connected with the _Dream,_ but also with the other comedies of love; Romeo passes there with like rapidity, indeed suddenness to the personages of those comedies from love of Rosalind to love of Juliet. At the first sight of Juliet he is conquered and believes that he then loves for the first time:
"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."