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.
Looking across the intervale of our prosaic concerns, we descry the outlines of Hamlet, as they build on the horizon a symmetry, enticing depth, weird masses, and a lonely top. We try to recognize the distinctions of this grand object which has been lifted there for ever to attract the curiosity of men. It is too remote to be minutely pictured: the shadows that apprise us of its deep seclusion veil the openings of paths by which it is to be explored. Stretches of a livelier color report to us the verdure and perfume of youth: the clouds that fling their pensive intervals upon it pass off pursued by gladness. But we perceive whole tracts that slope inwardly to sombreness where the fancy is interrupted by awe and vague surmise. Whither will those rifts lead us? Into what places visited by nothing human, whence we hurriedly return, looking back with a sense of some invisible pursuit, as if the forest shuddered with an adjuration which overtook, beneath the ground, our feet? What various latitudes are repeated along that height, with a zone for every season! It is shaped by all the weathers of the year: it groups within itself the smiles, the terrors, the fitful moods of Nature, and puts them into a distance of sublime effect.