fine instinct of the true actor but
the splendid teaching of the highest poetry--the ray of supernal light
that flashes from the old Hebrew Bible; the blaze that streams from the
_Paradise Lost_; the awful glory through which, in the pages of Byron,
the typical figure of agonised but unconquerable revolt towers over a
realm of ruin:--

"On his brow
The thunder-scars are graven; from his eye
Glares forth the immortality of hell."

Ellen Terry, in her assumption of Margaret, once more displayed that
profound, comprehensive, and particular knowledge of human love--that
knowledge of it through the soul and not simply the mind--which is the
source of her exceptional and irresistible power. This Margaret was a
woman who essentially loves, who exists only for love, who has the
courage of her love, who gives all for love--not knowing that it is a
sacrifice--and whose love, at last, triumphant over death, is not only
her own salvation but that also of her lover. The point of strict
conformity to the conception of the poet, in physique and in spiritual
state, may be waived. Goethe's Margaret is a handsome, hardy girl, of
humble rank, who sometimes uses bad grammar and who reveals no essential
mind. She is just a delicious woman, and there is nothing about her
either metaphysical or mysterious. The wise Fiend, who knows that with
such a man as Faust the love of such a woman must outweigh all the
world, wisely tempts him with her, and infernally lures him to the
accomplishment of her ruin. But it will be observed that, aside from the
infraction of the law of man, the loves of Faust and Margaret are not
only innocent but sacred. This sanctity Mephistopheles can neither
pollute nor control, and through this he loses his victims. Ellen
Terry's Margaret was a delicious woman, and not metaphysical nor
mysterious; but it was Margaret imbued with the temperament of Ellen
Terry,--who, if ever an exceptional creature lived, is exceptional in
every particular. In her embodiment she transfigured the character: she
maintained it in an ideal world, and she was the living epitome of all
that is fascinating in essential womanhood--glorified by genius. It did
not seem like acting but like the revelation of a hallowed personal
experience upon which no chill worldly gaze should venture to intrude.

In that suggestive book in which Lady Pollock records her recollections
of Macready it is said that once, after his retirement, on