“Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penn’d,
    Sung by a fair queen in a Summer’s bower,
    With ravishing division, to her lute.”

For another instance, take a part of the exiled Duke’s speech in As You Like It, ii. 1: 

    “Sweet are the uses of adversity,
    Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
    Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
    And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
    Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.”

The Duke is a thoughtful, pensive, kind-hearted man, feeling keenly the wrong that has been done him, but not at all given to cherishing a resentful temper; and here, if I mistake not, his language relishes of the benevolent, meditative, and somewhat sentimental melancholy that marks his disposition.

Still more to the point, perhaps, is the passage in Hamlet, iv. 5, where Ophelia so touchingly scatters out the secrets of her virgin heart:  “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.—­Lord, we know what we are, but we know not what we may be.—­God be at your table!” And again:  “I hope all will be well.  We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i’ the cold ground.  My brother shall know of it; and so I thank you for your good counsel.—­Come, my coach!—­Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.”  A poor, crazed, but still gentle, sweet-tempered, and delicate-souled girl, quite unconscious of her own distress, yet still having a dim remembrance of the great sorrows that have crazed her,—­such is Ophelia here; and her very manner of speech takes the exact colour and tone of her mind.

Probably, however, the best example of all is one that I can but refer to, it being too long for quotation.  It is in the second scene of The Tempest, where Prospero relates to his daughter the story of his past life, at the same time letting her into the fact and the reasons of what he has just been doing, and still has in hand to do.  The dear wise old gentleman is here absent-minded, his thoughts being busy and very intent upon the tempest he has lately got up, and upon the incoming and forthcoming consequences of it; and he thinks Miranda is not attentive to what he is saying, because he is but half-attending to it himself.  This subdued mental agitation, and wandering of his thoughts from the matter his tongue is handling, silently registers itself in a broken, disjointed, and somewhat rambling course of narrative; that is, his style runs so in sympathy with his state of mind as to be unconsciously physiognomic of it.  Certainly it is among the Poet’s finest instances of “suiting the word to the action”; while at the same time it perfectly remembers the “special observance” of “o’erstepping not the modesty of nature.”

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