We have heard it objected to Romeo and Juliet that it is founded on an idle passion between a boy and a girl, who have scarcely seen and can have but little sympathy or rational esteem for one another, who have had no experience of the good or ills of life, and whose raptures or despair must be therefore equally groundless and fantastical.  Whoever objects to the youth of the parties in this play as ‘too unripe and crude’ to pluck the sweets of love, and wishes to see a first-love carried on into a good old age, and the passions taken at the rebound, when their force is spent, may find all this done in the Stranger and in other German plays, where they do things by contraries, and transpose nature to inspire sentiment and create philosophy.  Shakespeare proceeded in a more straightforward and, we think, effectual way.  He did not endeavour to extract beauty from wrinkles, or the wild throb of passion from the last expiring sigh of indifference.  He did not ’gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles’.  It was not his way.  But he has given a picture of human life, such as it is in the order of nature.  He has founded the passion of the two lovers not on the pleasures they had experienced, but on all the pleasures they had not experienced.  All that was to come of life was theirs.  At that untried source of promised happiness they slaked their thirst, and the first eager draught made them drunk with love and joy.  They were in full possession of their senses and their affections.  Their hopes were of air, their desires of fire.  Youth is the season of love, because the heart is then first melted in tenderness from the touch of novelty, and kindled to rapture, for it knows no end of its enjoyments or its wishes.  Desire has no limit but itself.  Passion, the love and expectation of pleasure, is infinite, extravagant, inexhaustible, till experience comes to check and kill it.  Juliet exclaims on her first interview with Romeo: 

     My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
     My love as deep.

And why should it not?  What was to hinder the thrilling tide of pleasure, which had just gushed from her heart, from flowing on without stint or measure, but experience which she was yet without?  What was to abate the transport of the first sweet sense of pleasure, which her heart and her senses had just tasted, but indifference which she was yet a stranger to?  What was there to check the ardour of hope, of faith, of constancy, just rising in her breast, but disappointment which she had not yet felt?  As are the desires and the hopes of youthful passion, such is the keenness of its disappointments, and their baleful effect.  Such is the transition in this play from the highest bliss to the lowest despair, from the nuptial couch to an untimely grave.  The only evil that even in apprehension befalls the two lovers is the loss of the greatest possible felicity; yet this loss is fatal to both, for they had rather