Shakespeare has here converted the forest of Arden into another Arcadia, where they ’fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’.  It is the most ideal of any of this author’s plays.  It is a pastoral drama in which the interest arises more out of the sentiments and characters than out of the actions or situations.  It is not what is done, but what is said, that claims our attention.  Nursed in solitude, ‘under the shade of melancholy boughs’, the imagination grows soft and delicate, and the wit runs riot in idleness, like a spoiled child that is never sent to school.  Caprice is and fancy reign and revel here, and stern necessity is banished to the court.  The mild sentiments of humanity are strengthened with thought and leisure; the echo of the cares and noise of the world strikes upon the ear of those ‘who have felt them knowingly’, softened by time and distance.  ’They hear the tumult, and are still.’  The very air of the place seems to breathe a spirit of philosophical poetry; to stir the thoughts, to touch the heart with pity, as the drowsy forest rustles to the sighing gale.  Never was there such beautiful moralizing, equally free from pedantry or petulance.

     And this their life, exempt from public haunts,
     Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
     Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Jaques is the only purely contemplative character in Shakespeare.  He thinks, and does nothing.  His whole occupation is to amuse his mind, and he is totally regardless of his body and his fortunes.  He is the prince of philosophical idlers; his only passion is thought; he sets no value upon anything but as it serves as food for reflection.  He can ‘suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’; the motley fool, ‘who morals on the time’, is the greatest prize he meets with in the forest.  He resents Orlando’s passion for Rosalind as some disparagement of his own passion for abstract truth; and leaves the Duke, as soon as he is restored to his sovereignty, to seek his brother out, who has quitted it, and turned hermit.

     —­Out of these convertites
     There is much matter to be heard and learnt.

Within the sequestered and romantic glades of the Forest of Arden, they find leisure to be good and wise, or to play the fool and fall in love.  Rosalind’s character is made up of sportive gaiety and natural tenderness:  her tongue runs the faster to conceal the pressure at her heart.  She talks herself out of breath, only to get deeper in love.  The coquetry with which she plays with her lover in the double character which she has to support is managed with the nicest address.  How Full of voluble, laughing grace is all her conversation with Orlando: 

     —­In heedless mazes running
     With wanton haste and giddy cunning.

How full of real fondness and pretended cruelty is her answer to him when he promises to love her ‘For ever and a day’!