Before you hazard; for in choosing wrong,
I lose your company; therefore, forbear awhile;
There's something tells me, (but it is not love,)
I would not lose you; and you know yourself,
Hate counsels not in such a quality:
But lest you should not understand me well,
(And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought)
I would detain you here some month or two
Before you venture for me. I could teach you
How to choose right—but then I am forsworn;—
So will I never be: so you may miss me;—
But if you do, you'll make me wish a sin,
That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,
They have o'erlooked me, and divided me:
One half of me is yours, the other half yours—
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,
And so all yours!
The short dialogue between the lovers is exquisite.
BASSANIO.
Let me choose,
For, as I am, I live upon the rack.
PORTIA.
Upon the rack, Bassanio? Then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.
BASSANIO.
None, but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love.
There may as well be amity and life
'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.
PORTIA.
Ay! but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak any thing.
BASSANIO.
Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth.
PORTIA.
Well then, confess, and live.
BASSANIO.
Confess and love
Had been the very sum of my confession!
O happy torment, when my torturer
Doth teach me answers for deliverance!
A prominent feature in Portia's character is that confiding, buoyant spirit, which mingles with all her thoughts and affections. And here let me observe, that I never yet met in real life, nor ever read in tale or history, of any woman, distinguished for intellect of the highest order, who was not also remarkable for this trusting spirit, this hopefulness and cheerfulness of temper, which is compatible with the most serious habits of thought, and the most profound sensibility. Lady Wortley Montagu was one instance; and Madame de Staël furnishes another much more memorable. In her Corinne, whom she drew from herself, this natural brightness of temper is a prominent part of the character. A disposition to doubt, to suspect, and to despond, in the young, argues, in general, some inherent weakness, moral or physical, or some miserable and radical error of education; in the old, it is one of the first symptoms of age; it speaks of the influence of sorrow and experience, and foreshows the decay of the stronger and more generous powers of the soul. Portia's strength of intellect takes a natural tinge from the flush and bloom of her young and prosperous existence, and from her fervent imagination. In the casket-scene, she fears indeed the issue of the trial; on which more than her life is hazarded but while she trembles, her hope is stronger than her fear. While Bassanio is contemplating the caskets, she suffers herself to dwell for one moment on the possibility of disappointment and misery.
Let music sound while he doth make his choice;
Then if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,
Fading in music: that the comparison
May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream
And watery death-bed for him.
Then, immediately follows that revulsion of feeling, so beautifully characteristic of the hopeful, trusting, mounting spirit of this noble creature.
But he may win!
And what is music then?—then music is
Even as the flourish, when true subjects bow
To a new-crowned monarch: such it is
As are those dulcet sounds at break of day,
That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear,
And summon him to marriage. Now he goes
With no less presence, but with much more love
Than young Alcides, when he did redeem
The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea monster. I stand here for sacrifice.
Here, not only the feeling itself, born of the elastic and sanguine spirit which had never been touched by grief, but the images in which it comes arrayed to her fancy—the bridegroom waked by music on his wedding-morn—the new-crowned monarch—the comparison of Bassanio to the young Alcides, and of herself to the daughter of Laomedon—are all precisely what would have suggested themselves to the fine poetical imagination of Portia in such a moment.
Her passionate exclamations of delight, when Bassanio has fixed on the right casket, are as strong as though she had despaired before. Fear and doubt she could repel; the native elasticity of her mind bore up against them; yet she makes us feel, that, as the sudden joy overpowers her almost to fainting, the disappointment would as certainly have killed her.
How all the other passions fleet to air,
As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embraced despair,
And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy?
O love! be moderate, allay thy ecstasy;
In measure rain thy joy scant this excess;
I feel too much thy blessing: make it less,
For fear I surfeit!
Her subsequent surrender of herself in heart and soul, of her maiden freedom, and her vast possessions, can never be read without deep emotions; for not only all the tenderness and delicacy of a devoted woman, are here blended with all the dignity which becomes the princely heiress of Belmont, but the serious, measured self-possession of her address to her lover, when all suspense is over, and all concealment superfluous, is most beautifully consistent with the character. It is, in truth, an awful moment, that in which a gifted woman first discovers, that besides talents and powers, she has also passions and affections; when she first begins to suspect their vast importance in the sum of her existence; when she first confesses that her happiness is no longer in her own keeping, but is surrendered forever and forever into the dominion of another! The possession of uncommon powers of mind are so far from affording relief or resource in the first intoxicating surprise—I had almost said terror—of such a revolution, that they render it more intense. The sources of thought multiply beyond calculation the sources of feeling; and mingled, they rush together, a torrent deep as strong. Because Portia is endued with that enlarged comprehension which looks before and after, she does not feel the less, but the more: because from the height of her commanding intellect she can contemplate the force, the tendency, the consequences of her own sentiments—because she is fully sensible of her own situation, and the value of all she concedes—the concession is not made with less entireness and devotion of heart, less confidence in the truth and worth of her lover, than when Juliet, in a similar moment, but without any such intrusive reflections—any check but the instinctive delicacy of her sex, flings herself and her fortunes at the feet of her lover:
And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay,
And follow thee, my