vement and naturalness of gesture that the observer almost forgot to
notice the method of the mechanism and quite forgot that he was looking
upon a fiction and a shadow. That her personation of Imogen, though more
exalted in its nature than any of her works, excepting Isabella, would
rival in public acceptance her Juliet, Viola, or Rosalind, was not to
be expected: it was too much a passive condition--delicate and
elusive--and too little an active effort. She woke into life the
sleeping spirit of a rather repellant drama, and was "alone the Arabian
bird."

Shakespeare's Juliet, the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of his consummate
poem of love and sorrow, was the most effective, if not the highest of
Adelaide Neilson's tragic assumptions. It carried to every eye and to
every heart the convincing and thrilling sense equally of her beauty and
her power. The exuberant womanhood, the celestial affection, the
steadfast nobility, and the lovely, childlike innocence of Imogen--shown
through the constrained medium of a diffusive romance--were not to all
minds appreciable on the instant. The gentle sadness of Viola, playing
around her gleeful animation and absorbing it as the cup of the white
lily swallows the sunshine, might well be, for the more blunt senses of
the average auditor, dim, fitful, evanescent, and ineffective. Ideal
heroism and dream-like fragrance--the colours of Murillo or the poems of
Heine--are truly known but to exceptional natures or in exceptional
moods. The reckless, passionate idolatry of Juliet, on the
contrary,--with its attendant sacrifice, its climax of disaster, and its
sequel of anguish and death,--stands forth as clearly as the white line
of the lightning on a black midnight sky, and no observer can possibly
miss its meaning. All that Juliet is, all that she acts and all that she
suffers, is elemental. It springs directly from the heart and it moves
straight onward like a shaft of light. Othello, the perfection of
simplicity, is not simpler than Juliet. In him are embodied passion and
jealousy, swayed by an awful instinct of rude justice. In her is
embodied unmixed and immitigable passion, without law, limit, reason,
patience, or restraint. She is love personified and therefore a fatality
to herself. Presented in that way--and in that way she was presented by
Adelaide Neilson--her nature and her experience come home to the
feelings as well as the imagination, and all that we know, as well as
all that