Then too how nobly and serenely indifferent the glorious creatures are to the fashions and opinions and criticisms of the world!  How composedly some of them walk amidst the sharpest perils and adversities, as “having the spirit to do any thing that is not foul in the truth of their spirit.”  Full of bitterness their cup sometimes is indeed; yet they do not mind it,—­not they!—­save as the welfare and happiness of others are involved in what pinches them.  Several of them are represented passing through the most ticklish and trying situations in which it is possible for female modesty to be placed,—­disguised in male attire and sharing as men in the conversations of men; yet so unassailable is their modesty, that they give themselves, apparently, no trouble about it.  And, framed as they are, all this may well be so:  for indeed such is their fear of God, or, which comes to the same thing, their fear of doing wrong, that it casts out all other fears; and so their “virtue gives herself light through darkness for to wade.”  Nor do we wonder that, timid maidens as they are, they should “put such boldness on”; for we see that with them

        “Mighty are the soul’s commandments
        To support, restrain, or raise: 
    Foes may hang upon their path, snakes rustle near,
    But nothing from their inward selves have they to fear.”

It is very noteworthy, withal, how some of them are so secure in the spirit and substance of the moral law, that they do not scruple, in certain circumstances, to overrule its letter and form.  Thus Isabella feigns to practise sin; and she does so as a simple act of self-sacrifice, and because she sees that in this way a good and pious deed may be done in aid of others:  she shrinks not from the social imputation of wrong in that case, so her conscience be clear; and she can better brave the external finger of shame than the inward sense of leaving a substantial good undone.  Helena, also, puts herself through a course of literal dishonours, and this too, with a perfect understanding of what she is about; yet she yields to no misgivings; not indeed on the ground that the end justifies the means, but because she knows that the soul of a just and honorable purpose, such as hers, will have power to redeem and even to sanctify the formal dishonours of its body.  Much the same principle holds, again, in the case of Desdemona’s falsehood, when, Emilia rushing into the room, and finding her dying, and asking, “Who has done this?” she sighs out, “Nobody—­I myself:  commend me to my kind lord.”  I believe no natural heart can help thinking the better of Desdemona for this brave and tender untruth, for it is plainly the unaffected utterance of a deeper truth; and one must be blind indeed not to see that the dying woman’s purpose is to shield her husband, so far as she can, from the retribution which she apprehends will befall him, and the thought of which wrings her pure breast more sharply than the pangs of death.