And again, just before he hears the sudden tidings of her death: 

     If I may trust the flattery of sleep,
     My dreams presage some joyful news at hand;
     My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne,
     And all this day an unaccustom’d spirit
     Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. 
     I dreamt my lady came and found me dead,
     (Strange dream! that gives a dead man leave to think)
     And breath’d such life with kisses on my lips,
     That I reviv’d and was an emperor. 
     Ah me! how sweet is love itself possessed,
     When but love’s shadows are so rich in joy!

Romeo’s passion for Juliet is not a first love:  it succeeds and drives out his passion for another mistress, Rosaline, as the sun hides the stars.  This is perhaps an artifice (not absolutely necessary) to give us a higher opinion of the lady, while the first absolute surrender of her heart to him enhances the richness of the prize.  The commencement, progress, and ending of his second passion are however complete in themselves, not injured, if they are not bettered by the first.  The outline of the play is taken from an Italian novel; but the dramatic arrangement of the different scenes between the lovers, the more than dramatic interest in the progress of the story, the development of the characters with time and circumstances, just according to the degree and kind of interest excited, are not inferior to the expression of passion and nature.  It has been ingeniously remarked among other proofs of skill in the contrivance of the fable, that the improbability of the main incident in the piece, the administering of the sleeping-potion, is softened and obviated from the beginning by the introduction of the Friar on his first appearance culling simples and descanting on their virtues.  Of the passionate scenes in this tragedy, that between the Friar and Romeo when he is told of his sentence of banishment, that between Juliet and the Nurse when she hears of it, and of the death of her cousin Tybalt (which bear no proportion in her mind, when passion after the first shock of surprise throws its weight into the scale of her affections), and the last scene at the tomb, are among the most natural and overpowering.  In all of these it is not merely the force of any one passion that is given, but the slightest and most unlooked-for transitions from one to another, the mingling currents of every different feeling rising up and prevailing in turn, swayed by the master-mind of the poet, as the waves undulate beneath the gliding storm.  Thus when Juliet has by her complaints encouraged the Nurse to say, ‘Shame come to Romeo’, she instantly repels the wish, which she had herself occasioned, by answering: 

     Blister’d be thy tongue
     For such a wish, he was not born to shame. 
     Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit,
     For ’tis a throne where honour may be crown’d
     Sole monarch of the universal earth! 
     O, what a beast was I to chide him so!