Atlantic monthly Volume 35

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 ...that flung in the path of so rich and passionate a nature a five-brand like Romeo. Even if no family feud had existed, the match would not have been a wise one. As it was, the well-known result was inevitable. What could come of it but clandestine meetings, secret marriage, flight, despair, poison, and the Tomb of the Capulets? I had left the park behind, by this, and had entered a thoroughfare where the street-lamps were closer together; but the gloom of the trees seemed to be still overhanging me. The fact is, the tragedy had laid a black finger on my imagination. I wished the play had ended a trifle more cheerfully. I wished--possibly because I see enough tragedy all around me without going to the theatre for it, or possibly it was because the lady who enacted the leading part was a remarkably clean-cut little person with a golden sweep of eyelashes.--. I wished that Juliet could have had a more comfortable time of it. Instead of a yawning sepulchre, with Romeo and Juliet dying in the middle foreground, and that luckless young Paris stretched out on the left, spitted like a spring-chicken with Montague's rapier, and Friar Laurence, with a dark lantern, groping about under the melancholy yews,--in place of all this costly piled-up woe, I would have liked a pretty, mediaeval chapel scene, with illuminated stained-glass windows, and trim acolytes holding lighted candles, and the great green curtain descending slowly to the first few bars of the Wedding March of Mendelssohn. Of course Shakespeare was true to the life in making them all die miserably. Besides, it was so they died in the novel of Matteo Bandello, from which the poet took his plot indirectly. Under the circumstances no other denouement was practicable; and yet it was sad business. There were Me...