This play presents a beautiful coup d’oeil of the progress of human life.  In thought it occupies years, and embraces the circle of the affections from childhood to old age.  Juliet has become a great girl, a young woman since we first remember her a little thing in the idle prattle of the nurse.  Lady Capulet was about her age when she became a mother, and old Capulet somewhat impatiently tells his younger visitors: 

     —­I’ve seen the day,
     That I have worn a visor, and could tell
     A whispering tale in a fair lady’s ear,
     Such as would please:  ’tis gone, ’tis gone, ’tis gone.

Thus one period of life makes way for the following, and one generation pushes another off the stage.  One of the most striking passages to show the intense feeling of youth in this play is Capulet’s invitation to Paris to visit his entertainment.

     At my poor house, look to behold this night
     Earth-treading stars that make dark heav’n light;
     Such comfort as do lusty young men feel
     When well-apparel’d April on the heel
     Of limping winter treads, even such delight
     Among fresh female-buds shall you this night
     Inherit at my house.

The feelings of youth and of the spring are here blended together like the breath of opening flowers.  Images of vernal beauty appear to have floated before the author’s mind, in writing this poem, in profusion.  Here is another of exquisite beauty, brought in more by accident than by necessity.  Montague declares of his son smit with a hopeless passion, which he will not reveal: 

     But he, his own affection’s counsellor,
     Is to himself so secret and so close,
     So far from sounding and discovery,
     As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
     Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
     Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.

This casual description is as full of passionate beauty as when Romeo dwells in frantic fondness on ’the white wonder of his Juliet’s hand’.  The reader may, if he pleases, contrast the exquisite pastoral simplicity of the above lines with the gorgeous description of Juliet when Romeo first sees her at her father’s house, surrounded by company and artificial splendour.

     What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand
     Of yonder knight? 
     O she doth teach the torches to burn bright;
     Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
     Like a rich jewel in an Aethiop’s ear.

It would be hard to say which of the two garden scenes is the finest, that where he first converses with his love, or takes leave of her the morning after their marriage.  Both are like a heaven upon earth:  the blissful bowers of Paradise let down upon this lower world.  We will give only one passage of these well-known scenes to show the perfect refinement and delicacy of Shakespeare’s conception of the female character.  It is wonderful how Collins, who was a critic and a poet of great sensibility, should have encouraged the common error on this subject by saying—­’But stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone’.