"Could I come near your beauty with my nails, I'd set my ten commandments in your face."
If among the points of a well-nurtured woman there be those that are feline, they are generally retracted into velvet sheaths, and scarce surmised to be there till a scratch is made so silently that you have no evidence of it but your blood. But if Old Probabilities should overhear a woman blustering in a fashion as follows,--
"Though in this place most master wear no breeches, She shall not strike Dame Eleanor unreveng'd,"--
he would at once order cautionary signals. When a man scolds in the pulpit or a woman on the platform, the planets shudder, shrink, and grow more crusty.
Bassanio had caught a throb from the soft breath of Portia which seemed to be a herald of the beauty he describes afterwards when the lucky lid is lifted,--
"Here in her hairs The painter plays the spider, and hath woven A golden mesh t' entrap the hearts of men, Faster than gnats in cobwebs; but her eyes! How could he see to do them? Having made one, Methinks, it should have power to steal both his, And leave itself unfurnish'd."
She knows that this portrait of herself lies in the leaden casket; so that whenever a suitor comes to speculate upon the chance of finding it, how that sweet breath must break into flurries of dread which call into the eyes a distant alarm! For, before her father died, she had seen Bassanio, and secretly preferred him; and we hear him tell Antonio in confidence that
"Sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair speechless messages."
No doubt he did; but they escaped to him just like prisoners' glances that are in vague quest of some confederate instinct, and slip through a grating; for she was double-locked in durance of shyness and enforced seclusion, and, "in terms of choice," could not be
"Solely led By nice direction of a maiden's eyes:"
kept aloof and sacred by an oath to a dying father, yet so perfectly a woman that too little rather than too much betrayed her; for, as she says, "a maiden hath no tongue but thought."
The princely suitors file before the caskets, pondering how to match her picture with herself. She has all the captivating glamour of a pure blonde.
"Her sunny locks Hang on her temples like a golden fleece; Which makes her seat of Belmont, Colchos' strand, And many Jasons come in quest of her."