soul

   ‘Stay, gentle Helena,’ says Lysander in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘hear my excuse;/My love, my life, my soul, fair Helena!’ ‘My soul’ in such a context is clearly a passionate endearment.

   There is a similar usage in Cymbeline, when Imogen hangs around her husband’s neck, embracing him. He says to her: ‘Hangf there like fruit, my soul/Till the tree die!’ With this it is interesting to compare the dialectal usage of later times in Gone to Earth, by Mary Webb: ‘Tell us more, Hazel!’ pleaded Edward. ‘What for do you want to hear, my soul?’ Edward flushed at the caressing phrase, and Mrs Marston looked as indignant as was possible to her physiognomy, until she realized that it was a mere form of speech.

   ‘Mere form of speech’ is perhaps going too far, but the force of ‘my soul’, ‘good soul’, or ‘souls’ used to a number of people, had certainly weakened considerably by the nineteenth century, as the novels of Thomas Hardy make clear. ‘Come in, souls, and have something to eat and drink,’ occurs in Far from the Madding Crowd, where ‘souls’ could be replaced by ‘friends’.

   In modern English ‘soul’ is little used vocatively, and in third person reference may mean little more than person in an utterance like ‘She’s been very ill lately, poor soul.’ In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Eva is ‘you sweet, little obliging soul’ to her father, the vocative being perhaps inspired by the Christian sentiments she has just uttered.