s back my old girlish
desire for "fame." Every now and then I feel quite proud at the
idea of acting in a play of my own at two and twenty, and then I
look again at my "good works," this precious play, and it seems to
be no better than "filthy rags." But perhaps I may do better
hereafter. Hereafter! Oh dear! how many things are better than
doing even the best in this kind! how many things must be better
than real fame! but if one has none of those, fame might, perhaps,
be pleasant. No actor's fame, or rather celebrity, or rather
notoriety, would satisfy me; that is the shadow of a cloud, the
echo of a sound, the memory of a dream, nothing come of nothing.
The finest actor is but a good translator of another man's work; he
does somebody else's thought into action, but he creates nothing,
and that seems to me the test of genius, after all.

_Friday._--At eleven to the theater to rehearse "Katharine of
Cleves." ... We all went to the theater to see "Rob Roy," and I was
sorry that I did, for it gave me such a home-sick longing for
Edinburgh, and the lovely sea-shore out by Cramond, and the sunny
coast of Fife. How all my delightful, girlish, solitary rambles
came back to me! Why do such pleasant times ever pass? or why do
they ever come? The Scotch airs set me crying with all the
recollections they awakened. In spite, moreover, of my knowing
every plank and pulley, and scene-shifter and carpenter behind
those scenes, here was I crying at this Scotch melodrama, feeling
my heart puff out my chest for "Rob Roy," though Mr Ward is, alas!
my acquaintance, and I know when he leaves the stage he goes and
laughs and takes snuff in the green room. How I did cry at the
Coronach and Helen Macgregor, though I know Mrs. Lovell is thinking
of her baby, and the chorus-singers of their suppers. How I did
long to see Loch Lomond and its broad, deep, calm waters once more,
and those lovely green hills, and the fir forests so fragrant in
the sun, and that dark mountain well, Loch Long, with its rocky
cliffs along whose dizzy edge I used to dream I was running in a
whirlwind; the little bays where the sun touched the water as it
soaked into cushions of thick, starry moss, and the great tufts of
purple heather all vibrating with tawny bees! Beautiful wilderness!
how g