whimsical comparisons as from the most vigorous and best manured soil.
“After some lines of sparkling dialogue, whose every word, falling on the phrase, causes millions of sportive spangles to fly right and left like a hammer on a red-hot iron bar, Rosalind asks Orlando whether peradventure he may know the man who hangs odes on hawthorns and elegies on brambles, and who seems to have the quotidian of love upon him, an ill which she is quite able to cure. Orlando confesses that it is he that is tormented by love, and asks her to do him the favor of showing him a remedy for this sickness, seeing that she has boasted of having several infallible ones for its cure. 'You in love?' replies Rosalind; 'you have none of the marks whereby a lover may be known; you have neither a lean cheek nor a blue and sunken eye; your hose is not ungartered, nor your sleeve unbuttoned, and your shoe is most gracefully tied; if you are in love with anyone it is assuredly with yourself, and you need not my remedies.
“It was not without genuine emotion that I replied textually as follows:
“'Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.'
“This answer so unexpected and strange, which is led up to by nothing, and had seemingly been written expressly for me as though by a species of provision on the part of the poet, greatly affected me as I uttered it standing before Theodore, whose divine lips were still slightly swelled with the ironic expression of the phrase that he had just spoken, while his eyes smiled with inexpressible sweetness, and a bright ray of kindness gilded all the loftiness of his young and beautiful countenance.
“'Me believe it! You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which I warrant she is apter to do, than to confess she does; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs these fair praises of Rosalind on the trees, and have you truly need of a remedy for your madness?”
“When she is quite satisfied that it is he, Orlando, and none other, who has rhymed these admirable verses going on so many feet, beautiful Rosalind consents to tell him her recipe. Its composition was as follows: She pretended to be the beloved of the love-sick suitor, who was obliged to woo her as though she had been his very mistress, and to cure him of his passion she indulged in the most extravagant caprices; would now weep and then smile; one day entertain him, another foreswear him; would scratch him and spit in his face, and not for a single moment be like herself; fantastical, inconstant, prudish, and languishing, she was all these in turns and the poor wretch had to endure or execute all the unruly fancies engendered by weariness, vapors, and the blues in the hollow head of a frivolous woman. A goblin, an ape, and an attorney all in one had not devised more maliciousness. This miraculous treatment had not failed to produce its effect; the sick one was driven from his mad humor of love into a living humor of madness-which was to foreswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook truly monastic; a most satisfactory result, and one, too, which might easily be expected.
“Orlando, as may well be believed, is not very anxious to recover his health by such means; but Rosalind insists and is desirous of undertaking the cure. She uttered the sentence: 'I would cure you if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote and woo me,' with so marked and visible an intention, and casting on me so strange a look, that I found it impossible not to give it a wider meaning than belongs to the words, nor see in it an indirect admonition to declare my true feelings. And when Orlando replies: 'With all my heart, good youth,' it was in a still more significant manner, and with a sort of spite at failing to make herself understood, that she uttered the reply: 'Nay, you must call me Rosalind.'
“Perhaps I was mistaken and thought I saw what had really no existence, but it seemed to me that Theodore had perceived my love, though I had most certainly never spoken a word of it to him, and that he was alluding, through the veil of these borrowed expressions, beneath this theatrical mask and in these hermaphrodite words to his real sex and to our mutual situation. It is quite impossible that so spiritual and refined a woman as she is should not have distinguished, from the very beginning, what was passing in my soul. In the absence of my words, my eyes and troubled air spoke plainly enough, and the veil of ardent friendship which I had cast over my love, was not so impenetrable that it could not be easily pierced by an attentive and interested observer. The most innocent and inexperienced girl would not have been checked by it for a moment.
“Some important reason, and one that I cannot discover, doubtless compels the fair one to this cursed disguise, which has been the cause of all my torments and was nearly making a strange lover of me: but for this, everything would have gone evenly and easily like a carriage with well greased wheels on a level and finely sanded road; I might have abandoned myself with sweet security to the most amorously vagrant dreamings, and taken in my hands the little white silky hand of my divinity without shuddering with horror, or shrinking twenty paces back as though I had touched a red-hot iron, or felt the claws of Beelzebub in person.
“Instead of being in despair and as agitated as a real maniac, of doing my utmost to feel remorse and of grieving because I failed, I should have said to myself every morning, stretching my arms with a sense of duty done and conscience at rest: 'I am in love,' a sentence as agreeable to say to yourself in the morning with your head on a soft pillow, and warm bed-clothes covering you, as any other imaginable sentence of four words, — always excepting this one: 'I have money.'
“After rising I should have placed myself before my glass, and there, looking at myself with a sort of respect, have waxed tender, as I combed my hair, over my poetic paleness, resolving at the same time to turn it to good account and duly make the most of it, for nothing can be viler than to make love with a scarlet phiz; and when you are so unfortunate as to be ruddy and in love, circumstances which may come together, I am of opinion that you should flour your physiognomy daily or renounce refinement and stick to the Margots and Toinons.
“I should then have breakfasted with compunction and gravity in order to nourish this dear body, this precious box of passion, to compose sound, amorous chyle and quick, hot blood for it from the juice of meat and game, and keep it in a condition to afford pleasure to charitable souls.
“Breakfast finished, and while picking my teeth, I should have woven a few heteroclite rhymes after the manner of a sonnet, and all in honor of my mistress; I should have found out a thousand little comparisons, each more unusual than another, and infinitely gallant. In the first quatrain there would have been a dance of suns, and in the second a minuet of theological virtues; the two tercets would not have been of an inferior style; Helen would have been treated like an inn-servant, and Paris like an idiot; the East would have had nothing to be envied for in the magnificence of metaphor; the last line, especially, would have been particularly admirable, and would have contained at least two conceits in a syllable; for a scorpion's venom is in its tail, and the merit of a sonnet is in the last line.
“The sonnet completed and well and duly transcribed on glazed and perfumed paper, I should have left the house a hundred cubits tall, bending my head lest I should knock against the sky and be caught in the clouds (a wise precaution), and should have gone and recited my new production to all my friends and enemies, then to infants at the breast of their nurses, then to the horses and donkeys, then to the walls and trees, just to know the opinion of creation respecting the last product of my vein.
“In social circles I should have spoken with women in a doctoral manner, and maintained sentimental theses in a grave and measured tone of voice, like a man who knows much more than he cares to say concerning the subject in hand, and has not acquired his knowledge from books;-a style which never fails to produce a prodigious effect, and causes all the women in the company who have ceased to mention their age, and the few little girls not invited to dance to turn up the whites of their eyes.
“I might have led the happiest life in the world, treading on the pug-dog's tail without its mistress making too great an outcry, upsetting tables laden with china, and eating the choicest morsel at table without leaving any for the rest of the party. All this would have been excused out of consideration for the well-known absent-mindedness of lovers; and as they saw me swallowing up everything with a wild look, everyone would have clasped his hands and said,' Poor fellow!'
“And then the dreamy, doleful air, the dishevelled hair, the untidy stockings, the slack cravat, the great hanging arms that I should have had! how I should have hastened through the avenues in the park, now swiftly, now slowly, after the fashion of a man whose reason is completely gone! How I should have stared at the moon and made rings in the water with profound tranquillity!
“But the gods have ordained it otherwise.
“I am smitten with a beauty in doublet and boots, with a proud Bradamant who scorns the garments of her sex, and leaves you at times wavering amid the most disquieting perplexities; her features and body are indeed the features and body of a woman, but her mind is unquestionably that of a man.
“My mistress is most proficient with the sword, and might teach the most experienced fencing master's assistant; she has had I do not know how many duels, and has killed or wounded three or four persons; she clears
