“Some natural tears she shed, but wiped them soon.”

She may have torn her clothes, and beaten her breast, and disfigured her face, and given vent to mourning and lamentations.  But she does not seek death, nor surrender herself to grief, nor court despair.  She renews her strength.  She reserves her arts for another victim.  She hopes to win Octavius as she had won Julius and Antony; for she was only thirty-nine, and still a queen.  And for what?  That she might retain her own sovereignty, or the independence of Egypt,—­still the most fertile of countries, rich, splendid, and with grand traditions which went back thousands of years; the oldest, and once the most powerful of monarchies. Her love was ever subservient to her interests.  Antony gave up ambition for love,—­whatever that love was.  It took possession of his whole being, not pure and tender, but powerful, strange; doubtless a mad infatuation, and perhaps something more, since it never passed away,—­admiration allied with desire, the worship of dazzling gifts, though not of moral virtues.  Would such a love have been permanent?  Probably not, since the object of it did not shine in the beauty of the soul, but rather in the graces and adornments of the body, intensified indeed by the lustre of bewitching social qualities and the brightness of a cultivated intellect.  It is hard to analyze a passionate love between highly gifted people who have an intense development of both the higher and the lower natures, and still more difficult when the idol is a Venus Polyhymnia rather than a Venus Urania.  But the love of Antony, whether unwise, or mysterious, or unfortunate, was not feigned or forced:  it was real, and it was irresistible; he could not help it.  He was enslaved, bound hand and foot.  His reason may have rallied to his support, but his will was fettered.  He may have had at times dark and gloomy suspicions,—­that he was played with, that he was cheated, that he would be deserted, that Cleopatra was false and treacherous.  And yet she reigned over him; he could not live without her.  She was all in all to him, so long as the infatuation lasted; and it had lasted fourteen years, with increasing force, in spite of duty and pressing labors, the calls of ambition and the lust of power.  In this consuming and abandoned passion, for fourteen years,—­so strange and inglorious, and for a woman so unworthy, even if he were no better than she,—­we see one of the great mysteries of our complex nature, not uncommon, but insoluble.

I have no respect for Antony, and but little admiration.  I speak of such mad infatuation as a humiliating exhibition of human weakness.  Any one under its fearful spell is an object of pity.  But I have more sympathy for him than for Cleopatra, although she was doubtless a very gifted woman.  He was her victim; she was not his.  If extravagant and reckless and sensual, he was frank, generous, eloquent, brave, and true to her.  She was artful, designing, and selfish,