is part to test any tragic power. I wish you would study Juliet for
me." Study to me then, as unfortunately long afterward, simply meant to
learn by heart, which I did again, and repeated my lesson to my mother,
who again heard me without any observation whatever. Meantime my father
returned to town and my letter remained unanswered, and I was wondering
in my mind what reply I should receive to my urgent entreaty, when one
morning my mother told me she wished me to recite Juliet to my father;
and so in the evening I stood up before them both, and with
indescribable trepidation repeated my first lesson in tragedy.

They neither of them said anything beyond "Very well,--very nice, my
dear," with many kisses and caresses, from which I escaped to sit down
on the stairs half-way between the drawing-room and my bedroom, and get
rid of the repressed nervous fear I had struggled with while reciting,
in floods of tears. A few days after this my father told me he wished to
take me to the theater with him to try whether my voice was of
sufficient strength to fill the building; so thither I went. That
strange-looking place, the stage, with its racks of pasteboard and
canvas--streets, forests, banqueting-halls, and dungeons--drawn apart on
either side, was empty and silent; not a soul was stirring in the
indistinct recesses of its mysterious depths, which seemed to stretch
indefinitely behind me. In front, the great amphitheater, equally empty
and silent, wrapped in its gray holland covers, would have been
absolutely dark but for a long, sharp, thin shaft of light that darted
here and there from some height and distance far above me, and alighted
in a sudden, vivid spot of brightness on the stage. Set down in the
midst of twilight space, as it were, with only my father's voice coming
to me from where he stood hardly distinguishable in the gloom, in those
poetical utterances of pathetic passion I was seized with the spirit of
the thing; my voice resounded through the great vault above and before
me, and, completely carried away by the inspiration of the wonderful
play, I acted Juliet as I do not believe I ever acted it again, for I
had no visible Romeo, and no audience to thwart my imagination; at
least, I had no consciousness of any, though in truth I had one. In the
back of one of the private boxes, commanding the stage but perfectly
invisible to me, sat an old and warmly attached friend of my father's,
Major D----, a man of the wor