In Shakespeare’s delineations as in nature, we may commonly note that love, in proportion as it is deep and genuine, is also inward and reserved.  To be voluble, to be fond of spreading itself in discourse, or of airing itself in the fineries of speech, seems indeed quite against the instinct of that passion; and its best eloquence is when it ties up the tongue, and steals out in other modes of expression, the flushing of the cheeks and the mute devotion of the eyes.  In its purest forms, it is apt to be a secret even unto itself, the subjects of it knowing indeed that something ails them, but not knowing exactly what.  So that the most effective love-making is involuntary and unconscious.  And I suspect that, as a general thing, if the true lover’s passion be not returned before it is spoken, it stands little chance of being returned at all.

Now, in Orsino’s case, the passion, or whatever else it may be, is too much without to be thoroughly sound within.  Like Malvolio’s virtue, it is too glass-gazing, too much enamoured of its own image, and renders him too apprehensive that it will be the death of him, if disappointed of its object.  Accordingly he talks too much about it, and his talking about it is too ingenious withal; it makes his tongue run glib and fine with the most charming divisions of poetic imagery and sentiment; all which shrewdly infers that he lacks the genuine thing, and has mistaken something else for it.  Yet, when we hear him dropping such riches as this,—­

    “O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
     Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence!”

and this,—­

      “She that hath a heart of that fine frame
    To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
    How will she love when the rich golden shaft
    Hath kill’d the flock of all affections else
    That live in her!”—­

we can hardly help wishing that such were indeed the true vernacular of that passion.  But it is not so, and on the whole it is much better than so:  for love, that which is rightly so called, uses a diviner language even than that; and this it does when, taking the form of religion, it sweetly and silently embodies itself in deeds.  And this is the love that Southey had in mind when he wrote,—­

    “They sin who tell us love can die.”

In Viola, divers things that were else not a little scattered are thoroughly composed; her character being the unifying power that draws all the parts into true dramatic consistency.  Love-taught herself, it was for her to teach both Orsino and Olivia how to love:  indeed she plays into all the other parts, causing them to embrace and cohere within the compass of her circulation.  And yet, like some subtile agency, working most where we perceive it least, she does all this without rendering herself a special prominence in the play.