e, yet
delicate as a silver thread--a voice

"Like the whisper of the woods
In prime of even, when the stars are few."

It did not surprise that such a woman should truly act Juliet. Much
though there be in a personality that is assumed, there is much more in
the personality that assumes it. Golden fire in a porcelain vase would
not be more luminous than was the soul of that actress as it shone
through her ideal of Juliet. The performance did not stop short at the
interpretation of a poetic fancy. It was amply and completely that--but
it was more than that, being also a living experience. The subtlety of
it was only equalled by its intensity, and neither was surpassed except
by its reality. The moment she came upon the scene all eyes followed
her, and every imaginative mind was vaguely conscious of something
strange and sad--a feeling of perilous suspense--a dark presentiment of
impending sorrow. In that was felt at once the presence of a nature to
which the experience of Juliet would be possible; and thus the conquest
of human sympathy was effected at the outset--by a condition, and
without the exercise of a single effort. Fate no less than art
participated in the result. Though it was the music of Shakespeare that
flowed from the harp, it was the hand of living genius that smote the
strings; it was the soul of a great woman that bore its vital testimony
to the power of the universal passion.

Never was poet truer to the highest truth of spiritual life than
Shakespeare is when he invests with ineffable mournfulness--shadowy as
twilight, vague as the remembrance of a dream--those creatures of his
fancy who are preordained to suffering and a miserable death. Never was
there sounded a truer note of poetry than that which thrills in
Othello's, "If it were now to die," or sobs in Juliet's "Too early seen
unknown, and known too late." It was the exquisite felicity of Adelaide
Neilson's acting of Juliet that she glided into harmony with that
tragical undertone, and, with seemingly a perfect unconsciousness of
it--whether prattling to the old nurse, or moving, sweetly grave and
softly demure, through the stately figures of the minuet--was already
marked off from among the living, already overshadowed by a terrible
fate, already alone in the bleak loneliness of the broken heart.
Striking the keynote thus, the rest followed in easy sequence. The
ecstasy of the wooing scene, the agony of the final parting from Ro