rystal cups without muscular distortion of the rest
of the face. In proportion to the violence or depth of emotion, and the
acute or profound sensibility of the temperament, is the disturbance of
the countenance. In sensitive organizations, the muscles round the
nostrils and lips quiver and are distorted, the throat and temples
swell, and a grimace, which but for its miserable significance would be
grotesque, convulses the whole face. Men's tears always seem to me as if
they were pumped up from their heels, and strained through every drop of
blood in their veins; women's, to start as under a knife stroke, direct
with a gush from their heart, abundant and beneficent; but again, women
of the temperament I have alluded to above have fountains of lovely
tears behind their lovely eyes, and their weeping, which is
indescribably beautiful, is comparatively painless, and yet pathetic
enough to challenge tender compassion. I have twice seen such tears
shed, and never forgotten them: once from heaven-blue eyes, and the face
looked like a flower with pearly dewdrops sliding over it; and again,
once from magnificent, dark, uplifted orbs, from which the falling tears
looked like diamond rain-drops by moonlight.

Miss O'Neill was a supremely touching, but neither a powerful nor a
passionate actress. Personally, she was the very beau ideal of feminine
weakness in its most attractive form--delicacy. She was tall, slender,
elegantly formed, and extremely graceful; her features were regular and
finely chiseled, and her hair beautiful; her eyes were too light, and
her eyebrows and eyelashes too pale for expression; her voice wanted
variety and brilliancy for comic intonation, but was deep and sonorous,
and of a fine pathetic and tragic quality.

It was not an easy matter to find a Romeo for me, and in the emergency
my father and mother even thought of my brother Henry's trying the part.
He was in the first bloom of youth, and really might be called
beautiful; and certainly, a few years later, might have been the very
ideal of a Romeo. But he looked too young for the part, as indeed he
was, being three years my junior. The overwhelming objection, however,
was his own insuperable dislike to the idea of acting, and his ludicrous
incapacity for assuming the faintest appearance of any sentiment.
However, he learned the words, and never shall I forget the explosion of
laughter which shook my father, my mother, and myself, when, after
hearing h