VI - IMOGEN, PRINCESS OF BRITAIN

Summary

“Alas, poor princess,

Thou divine Imogen!”

“So every spirit, as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in:

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take,

For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.”

—Spenser.

MY DEAR ANNA SWANWICK,—

YOU wonder, I daresay, at my long delay in yielding to your urgent request that I should write of Imogen,—your chief favourite, as you tell me, among all Shakespeare's women. You would not wonder, could I make you feel how, by long brooding over her character, and by living through all her emotions and trials on the stage till she seemed to become “my very life of life,” I find it next to impossible to put her so far away from me that I can look at her as a being to be scanned, and measured, and written about. All words—such, at least, as are at my command—seem in adequate to express what I felt about her from my earliest years, not to speak of all that the experiences of my woman's heart and of human life have taught me since of the matchless truth and beauty with which Shakespeare has invested her. In drawing her he has made his masterpiece; and of all heroines of poetry or romance, who can be named beside her?