tractive or admirable. Yet Helena has been named by Coleridge "the loveliest of Shakspere's characters." Possibly Coleridge recognised in Helena the single quality which, if brought to bear upon himself by one to whom he yielded love and worship, would have given definite- · ness and energy to his somewhat vague and incoherent life. For sake of this one thing Shakspere was interested in the story, and so admirable did it seem to him, that he could not choose but endeavour to make beautiful and noble the entire character and action of Helena. This one thing is the energy, the leap-up, the direct advance of the will of Helena, her prompt, unerroneous tendency towards the right and efficient deed. She does not display herself through her words; she does not, except on rarest occasions, allow her feelings to expand and deploy themselves; her entire force of character is concentrated in what she does. And therefore we see her quite as much indirectly, through the effect which she has produced upon other persons of the drama, as through self-confession or immediate presentation of her character.

A motto for the play may be found in the words uttered with pious astonishment by the clown, when his mistress bids him to begone, "That man should be at woman's command and yet no hurt done." Helena is the providence of the play; and there is "no hurt done,” but rather healing-healing of the body of the French King, healing of the spirit of the man she loves.* For

"Nicht nur am Könige, sondern auch an Bertram vollbringt sie eine glückliche Heilung." Professor Karl Elze. Shakespeare Jahrbuch, vol. vii., p. 222.

Bertram when the story begins, though endowed with beauty and bravery and the advantages (and disadvantages), of rank, is in character, in heart, in will, a crude ungracious boy. Helena loves him, and sets him, in her love, above herself, the poor physician's daughter, out of her sphere:

"Twere all one

That I should love a bright, particular star,
And think to wed it, he is so above me.

She loves him thus, but (and such a condition of heart must be admitted as possible) she does not wholly like She admits to herself that in worship of Bertram there is a certain fatuousness,

him.

Now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy

Must sanctify his reliques.

She sees from the first that the friend of his choice, the French captain, is "a notorious liar," "solely a coward," "a great way fool;" she trembles for what Bertram may learn at the court.

God send him well!

The court's a learning place; and he is one-
Parol. What one i' faith?

Hel. That I wish well.

Yet she sees in Bertram a potential nobleness, waiting to be evoked. And her will leaps forward to help him. Now she loves him,-loves him with devotion which comes from a consciousness that she can confer much; and she will form him so that one day she shall like him also.

Which might be felt; that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,

Might with effects of them follow our friends,
And shew what we alone must think.

But the " wishing well" of such a woman as Helena has indeed a sensible and apprehensible body in it. With a sacred boldness she assumes a command over Bertram's fate and her own. She cannot believe in the piety of resignation, or passiveness, in the religious duty of letting things drift; rather, she finds in the love which prompts her a true mandate from above, and a veritable providential power :

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie

Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
What power is it that mounts my love so high?

Helena goes forth, encouraged by her mistress, the mother of the man she seeks to win; goes forth to gain her husband, to allay her own need of service to him, to impose herself on Bertram as the blessing that he requires. All this Helena does openly, with perfect courage. She does not conceal her love from the Countess; she does not for a moment dream of stealing after Bertram in man's attire. It is the most impulsively or the most delicately, and exquisitely feminine of Shakspere's women whom he delights to disguise in the "garnish of a boy," Julia with her hair knit up "in twenty odd-conceited true-love knots," Rosalind, the gallant curtle-axe upon her thigh, Viola, the sweet-voiced in whom "all is semblative a woman's part," Jessica, for whose transformation Cupid himself would blush, Portia

the wise young judge, so poignantly feminine in her gifts of intellect and heart, Imogen, who steps into the cavern's mouth with the advanced sword in a slender and trembling hand. In Helena there is so much solidity and strength of character that we feel she would be enfeebled by any male disguise which might complicate the impression produced by her plain womanhood. There could be no charm in presenting as a pretender to male courage one who was actually courageous as a

man.

But throughout, while Helena is abundantly courageous, Shakspere intends that she shall at no moment appear unwomanly. In offering herself to Bertram, she first discloses her real feeling by words addressed to one of the young lords, from among whom it is granted her to choose a husband :

Be not afraid that I your hand should take;
I'll never do you wrong for your own sake.

Only with Bertram she would venture on the bold experiment of wronging him for his own sake. The experiment, indeed, does not at first seem to succeed. Helena is wedded to Bertram; she has laid her will without reserve in her husband's hands; she had desired to surrender all to him, for his good, and she has surrendered all. But Bertram does not find this providential superintendence of his affairs of the heart, altogether to his taste; and in company with Parolles he flies from his wife's presence to the Italian war. Upon reading the concise and cruel letter in which Bertram has declared the finality of his separation from

her, Helena does not faint, nor does she break forth into bitter lamentation. "This is a dreadful sentence," ""Tis bitter," thus, pruning her words, Helena controls "the thoughts which swell and throng" over her, until they condense themselves into one strong purpose. She will leave her mother, leave her home, and when she is gone and forgotten Bertram will return from hardship and danger. But she would fain see him, and if anything can still be done, she will do that thing.

The mode by which Helena succeeds in accomplishing the conditions upon which Bertram has promised to acknowledge her as his wife, seems indeed hardly to possess any moral force, any validity for the heart or the conscience. It can only be said in explanation, that to Helena an infinite virtue and significance resides in a deed; out of a word or out of a feeling she does not hope for measureless good to come; but out of a deed what may not come? That Bertram should actually have received her as his wife, actually, though unwittingly, that he should indeed be father of the child she bears him; these are facts, accomplished things, which must work out some real advantage. And now Bertram has learnt his need of self-distrust, perhaps has learnt true modesty. His friend (who was all vain words apart from deeds), has been unmasked, and pitilessly exposed. May not Bertram now be capable of estimating the worth of things and of persons more justly? Helena, in taking the place of Diana, in beguiling her husband into at least material virtue, is still "doing him wrong, for his own sake." The man is "at woman's command," and there is "no hurt done."