All that which is past, says Bacon, "is as a dream; and he that hopes or depends upon time coming, dreams waking." And Poesy, we remember, was "the dream of knowledge," and " was thought to be somewhat inspired with divine rapture; which dreams likewise present." And thus speaks Imogen in the play :

For so I thought I was a cave-keeper,

And cook to honest creatures; but 't is not so:
'T was but a bolt of nothing, shot of nothing,
Which the brain makes of fumes. Our very eyes
Are sometimes like our judgments blind.
The dream's here still: even when I wake, it is
Without me, as within me: not imagin'd, felt."
Cymb., Act IV. Sc. 2.

§ 4. CUPID AND NEMESIS.

In Bacon's discussion of the Fables of Cupid and Nemesis, is to be found the whole philosophical foundation of the "Romeo and Juliet." One main object of the play was, to exhibit as in a model, under the dramatic form of artistic creation, the essential nature and character of love, and that Juliet that was "the perfect model of eternity," as being the executive beneficence of the creative power; for, says he, “love is nothing but goodness put in motion or applied," or again, "the original and unique force that constitutes and fashions all things out of matter, it being, next to God, the cause of causes, itself without cause"; or, as a more modern philosopher states it, love is "the essence of God," and "the idealism of Jesus" is but "a crude statement of the fact, that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself"; the Platonic and Christian love, or Milton's

"Bright effluence of bright essence increate";

1 Int. of Nature.

2 Wisd. of the Ancients, Works (Boston), XIII. 122.
3 Emerson's Essays, I. 183, 281.

2

and the same that turns Dante's heaven, and rains its virtue

down:

"E questo Cielo non ha altro dove,

Che la mente divina, in che s' accende

L'amor che l' volge e la virtu ch' ei piove";

or, as Romeo defines it:

"O, anything, of nothing first create!"

and Juliet, thus:

"Jul. And yet I wish but for the thing I have: My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite."

Act II. Sc. 2.

Not only the philosophy, but even the very language and imagery of these Fables of Cupid and Nemesis, as related by Bacon, are distinctly traceable in the play, as in this passage: :

"Jul. Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night!

Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match,

Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:

Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

Come, night, come Romeo, come thou day in night;

For thou will lie upon the wings of night,

Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.". Act 111. Sc. 2.

This is the same brooding wing of Night under which Cupid was hatched and born, in the complete antithesis of something and nothing, affirmative and negative, light and darkness; and the same ideas and imagery pervade the following lines:

"Rom. O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for Earth too dear!
So shews a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shews.".

Act I. Sc. 5.

And again, thus:—

"King. O, paradox! Black is the badge of Hell,
The hue of dungeons, and the shade of night;
And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well."

Love's L. L., Act IV. Sc. 3.

And thus the Sonnet, with a color of the same inspira

"Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited: and they mourners seem
At such, who not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem:

Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,

That every tongue says, beauty should do so." cxxvii

In like manner, the language and imagery as well as the leading ideas of the fable of Nemesis may be traced in many passages toward the end of the play: the following instances will explain themselves without further comment. In the interpretation of this fable, in the Wisdom of the Ancients, Bacon says:

"They say she was the daughter of Night and Ocean. She is represented with wings and a crown: an ashen spear in her right hand: a phial with Ethiops in it, in her left; sitting upon a stag. . . . . The parents of this goddess were Ocean and Night; that is, the vicissitude of things, and the dark and secret judgment of God. For the vicissitude of things is aptly represented by the Ocean, by reason of its perpetual flowing and ebbing; and secret providence is rightly set forth under the image of Night."

And thus it begins to appear in the play :—

"Rom. Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs;
Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;

Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears." Act I. Sc. 1.
Cap. How now! a conduit, girl? What! still in tears?
Evermore showering? In a little body

Thou counterfeit'st a bark, a sea, a wind.

For still thy eyes, which I may call the sea,

Do ebb and flow with tears; the bark thy body is,

Sailing in this salt flood; the winds, thy sighs;
Who, raging with thy tears, and they with them,
Without a sudden calm, will overset
Thy tempest-toss'd body."— Act III. Sc. 5.

"Nemesis is described as wing'd; because of the sudden and unforeseen revolutions of things":

and in the play, this sudden revolution and change of things is introduced in these lines:

Cap. All things, that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral,

Our instruments, to melancholy bells;
Our wedding cheer, to a sad burial feast;
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change;
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,

And all things change them to the contrary.". - Act IV. Sc. 5.

And again, the story continues:

"Nemesis is distinguished also with a crown; in allusion to the envious and malignant nature of the vulgar; for when the fortunate and the powerful fall, the people commonly exult and set a crown upon the head of Nemesis ";

which shows itself in the play, thus:
:-

"Nurse. Shame come to Romeo!
Jul.

Blister'd be thy tongue,

For such a wish! He was not born to shame:

Upon his brow shame is asham'd to sit;

For 't is a throne where honour may be crown'd

Sole monarch of the universal Earth." - Act III. Sc. 2.

"The spear in her right hand relates to those whom she actually strikes and transfixes. And if there be any whom she does not make victims of calamity and misfortune, to them she nevertheless exhibits that dark and ominous spectre, in her left: for mortals must needs be visited, even when they stand at the summit of felicity, with images of death, diseases, misfortunes, perfidies of friends, plots of enemies, changes of fortune and the like; even like those Ethiops in the phial."

And the play makes use of all this even to the phial full of Ethiops, spectres, and images of death, thus:

"Jul. Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks, and yellow chapless skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave,

And hide me with a dead man in his shroud;

Things that to hear them told have made me tremble;

And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love....
Fri. Take thou this phial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour; for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes; thy eyes' windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, depriv'd of supple government,
Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,

And then awake as from a pleasant sleep. Act IV. Sc. 1.

Jul

My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, phial.

Or, if I live, is it not very like,

The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place, -

As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,

Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are pack'd;
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort."

Act IV. Sc. 3.

"And certainly," continues Bacon with the fable, "when I have read that chapter of Caius Plinius in which he has collected the misfortunes and miseries of Augustus Cæsar, him whom I thought of all men the most fortunate, and who had moreover a certain art of using and enjoying his fortune, and in whose mind were no traces of swelling, of tightness, of softness, of confusion, or of melancholy, (insomuch that once he had determined to die voluntarily,)-great and powerful must this goddess be, I have thought, when such a victim was brought to the altar."

And of this swelling, tightness, softness, confusion, melan choly, and voluntary dying, and the splendid victim of this powerful goddess brought to the altar, we have some unmistakable exhibition in this play; and these misfortunes and miseries of Nemesis appear again in Romeo's speech to the Apothecary, all these several topics falling in at the proper time and place, and in such form as the course of the drama requires :