ed with an outward and visible form as youthful, beautiful,
and full of grace, as their passion itself was. Surely the balcony,
the garden, and grave-yard scenes, would have furnished admirable
subjects for his delicate and powerful hand. Is it possible that he
thinks the thing beyond him? I must go to work. Good-by.

Ever yours truly,
F. A. K.

You marked so many things in my manuscript book that I really felt
ashamed to copy them all, for I should have filled more than half
yours with my rhymes. I have just added to those I did transcribe a
sonnet I wrote on Monday night after the play.

It may have been that the execution of "Faust," his masterpiece,
disinclined Retsch for the treatment of another love story. He did
subsequently illustrate "Romeo and Juliet" with much grace and beauty;
but it is, as a whole, undoubtedly inferior to his illustrations of
Goethe's tragical love story. Retsch's genius was too absolutely German
to allow of his treating anything from any but a German point of view.
Shakespeare, Englishman as he is, has written an Italian "Romeo and
Juliet;" but Retsch's lovers are Teutonic in spite of their costume, and
nowhere, as in the wonderful play, is the Southern passion made manifest
through the Northern thought.

The private theatricals at Bridgewater House were fruitful of serious
consequences to me, and bestowed on me a lasting friendship and an
ephemeral love: the one a source of much pleasure, the other of some
pain. They entailed much intimate intercourse with Lord and Lady Francis
Leveson Gower, afterward Egerton, and finally Earl and Countess of
Ellesmere, who became kind and constant friends of mine. Victor Hugo's
play of "Hernani," full of fine and striking things, as well as of
exaggerations verging on the ludicrous, had been most admirably rendered
into rhymed verse by Lord Ellesmere. His translations from the German
and his English version of "Faust," which was one of the first attempts
to give a poetical rendering in our language of Goethe's masterpiece,
had won him some literary reputation, and his rhymed translation of
"Hernani" was a performance calculated to add to it considerably. He was
a very accomplished and charming person; good and amiable, clever,
cultivated, and full of fine literary and artistic taste. He was
singularly modest and shy, with a