"Had you deferred, at least, your hasty flight,

And left behind some pledge of our delight, Some babe to bless the mother's mournful sight,

Some young Æneas to supply your place, Whose features might express his father's face, &c. &c."

[By the by, why does Professor Anthon, from whose edition we transcribe, adopt the stupid reading of tamen for "tantum ?" Tamen is a relative term, and it is preceded here in the sentence by nothing upon which it can be construed to bear. Its reference then, if it have any, must be sought in the general tenor of the discourse; as if Dido, winding up her upbraidings of the faithless Trojan with the wish that he had left with her, for her consolation, an offspring of their love, should add: "qui tamen, who yet -that is, notwithstanding your perfidywould retain to me your image." But this interpretation seems to us strained, in the first place, and in the second, tautologous, the expression "parvulus Eneas" implying sufficiently this resemblance. Tamen then, would, in grammar and sentiment, be unworthy of even Campbell, not to say of Virgil.

But what can have been the objection to the established reading, "tantum ?" It not only has a meaning much more plain and proper than tamen-it has two of them; and, what more rarely happens, both equally natural, according as you suppose the one or the other of the following dispositions to be that of Dido: If we take her to design conciliation, or merely to yield to her tenderness," tantum" will signify so much as, at least, in countenance. Or it may, on the other hand, be dictated by resentment; and then the sense of "tantum ore," &c., will be -who should resemble, but only in face, his faithless father. The latter construction has our own preference, for two reasons: it seems to accord happily with the import above assigned to Dido's employment of the name Eneas, as implying the paternal likeness; but which her pride, alarmed lest she should be thought weak enough to include the moral qualities, hastens to modify by restricting the resemblance to the physical features. The second reason is, that the silly spiteful

ness of the reproach seems to us finely characteristic; although this very cir cumstance, we believe it was, that moved the heavy industry of the commentators to seek the substitute for "tantum" which we have been discussing. But Virgil probably was of the prevalent, however ungallant, opinion, that such is naturally woman's pique: and a queen is still a woman-especially a queen in love.]

To leave this enormous parenthesis: we have remarked that the language and wish of Dido was entirely in character, as well as in nature. She desires the solace of a living image of the lover she is to see no more. Here the situation of Campbell's heroine necessitates an awkward departure from his original. Gertrude wishes the solace, not for herself, who in fact is the party leaving, not the deserted; she consequently has to wish her own the image to be transmitted in the "one dear pledge." seems, indeed, more unselfish; but we have a great deal of doubt that it is quite so natural.

This

More obviously questionable, however, is the propriety of the imitation at all: Diversity of times, ranks, circumstances have not been duly considered. Dido had a double prerogative of free expression; she was a widow and a queen. Gertrude was a newly-wed and a country (nay, desert) bred girl. The earlier Roman manners were less corruptly fastidious than ours; add to which the dignified frankness of the Latin tongue. Whereas, with the modern manners and the prudery of our English dialect, the mere expression of such a desire would appear to be of more than doubtful delicacy, in a woman of the lowest refinement, or of the highest rank. Upon the whole, then, we do not fear to pronounce this lengthy "address" of Gertrude no better than a clever school-boy representation of book-learned sentiment; evincing certainly, (or we are greatly misinformed,) no very deep or nice acquaintance with the female heart.

In compensation of the preceding strictures, and in order to quit Campbell good-humoredly with a smile or more flattering still to a poet's memory, as to his vanity, with a tear-we subjoin a passage entirely worthy of even the exaggerated fame which we have sought to correct, not to disparage, and which, all things considered, is perhaps one of the best-earned in these times of factitious and whimsical reputations:

To conclude. The fundamental, and as we conceive a fatal, defect of Campbell, was want of passion: he had all the accessories which accomplish a poet. Exactly the reverse is Mrs. Welby's case. Using few or none of the aids from intellect or art, she is the very creature of passion-passion, indeed, in those its gentler moods, which take the names of Feeling and Fancy; but, nevertheless, passion pure and perennial. And thus are we conveniently brought back to the main object of the discussion; this rather long excursion from which, will be found, we hope, a digression only in appearance. Passion as the efficient, Pleasure as the effect, these are, then, the two poles upon which revolves the poet's world. We foresee a thousand objections to this, of course, and are sensible that in truth the narrowness of our original plan, as well as of our general limits, has not permitted the needful development of the principle. We can now, however, but entreat reflection upon what has been suggested, and add a remark or two to aid it.

Descriptive Poetry has always ranked as the lowest grade of the art: the reason is, it does not freely combine (so to speak) with Passion. Yet we have seen the note-book of a tourist, European tourist, too-a thing as repulsive to the Muse, one would think, as a lawyer's brief-turned into one of the finest poems in any language: need we name "Childe Harold." By what alchemy has this been effected? It can have been but by the poetical magnetism, or magic, of Passion. Have not his love-sonnets placed Petrarch by the side of Tasso and Dante Abstract the episodical Fourth Book, describing the loves of Dido, and who will read the Eneid a second time, for pleasure? What has preserved the sprightly frivolities of Anacreon amid a wreck which lost us some three-fourths of the most precious treasures of ancient genius? Only the amber of Passion, surely. Is it, you cry, that an Epic is not to take rank above a Madrigal? Not necessarily, as Poetry;

we do not hesitate to answer. As Fiction, as Philosophy, as Eloquence it may, of course, and commonly does, so rank; but these merits would be referred to this as in most cases, view the nature of their proper classes, if men did not, in things through their popular titles. We might pursue this induction indefinitely, where the sentiment of mankind seems to confirm our position; and we may resume it on some future occasion. Is not Sappho as immortal, aye, and as exalted (see Longinus) in her ode of some twenty lines, as Homer in his Odyssey and Iliad? What makes the Iliad itself unapproachably the first of Epics? Because it is the only one that has been produced by Passion, in exclusion of Thought and Art. Because it was composed at a stage in the mental development of mankind, when this exclusion was not only entirely practicable, but even necessary. And hence the literal truth of what Butler meant for satire, speaking of those learned critics,

"Who beauties view

As

In Homer, Homer never knew." He only felt them. Is not this observation, by the way, of some force against the anti-Homeric theory of Vico, and after him of Wolffe and other philological antiquaries, which rests mainly on the assumed improbability, that poems of so much merit should have been composed by an individual, in so rude an age? This rudeness of the age would, in our idea, be an aid, instead of an obstacle. most of those words which are to us now figurative, were, indubitably literal in those early ages, so those conceptions which appear to us efforts of imagination, or combinations of intellect, were vivid realities of sensation, the vigorous perceptions of passion-peculiarly excited, perhaps, by the beautiful climate of Homer-in the glowing adolescence of our race. This is the career of manfrom the concrete to the abstract. It alone explains the beautiful fabric of Heathen mythology. But to show how, would ask a volume, and we cannot afford a page.

Poetry then is Passion ;-because passion is the vitality of the soul, the energy of humanity, the reality, in fine, of the man. Whereas Thought addresses itself but to the understanding; which is, in a great degree, a thing factitious, superinduced, extraneous (so to speak) to our essential personality, and formed only to conduct us through the hollow masquerade of external life.

0.

THE passion for stage representations is almost universal. It has withstood all the attacks which the abusers of the drama have, in every age, excited; and it does not seem to have lost any vigor by the changes of time. It is really capable of being made an instrument of the highest and most refined pleasure. Through the theatre, the great works of some of the world's greatest poets are introduced to the people, and brought home to the eye and the heart with peculiar vividness and power. To be a good actor is a distinction limited to a very few. The person who can act Hamlet or Macbeth, Juliet or Cordelia, so as to impress large multitudes with a new sense of their beauty and power, is entitled to no small amount of the admiration and respect we award to intellectual achievement. Of late, it appears to us, there has been a fresh interest taken in theatrical exhibitions; and as it seems to be a settled point that there will be a theatre in every large city, every thing which indicates a revival of the true dramatic spirit, everything which exhibits the theatre in a favorable light, should excite no common pleasure.

In view of this, it is with peculiar satisfaction that we hail the appearance of an actress, who brings to the stage the delicacy of feeling and the graces of mind and manner, nurtured and developed in private life. Previous to her début last summer, MRS. MOWATT had been favorably known as an authoress. Her contributions, in verse and prose, to various periodicals, her comedy of "Fashion," and her novel of "Evelyn," displayed a brilliant, versatile and observing mind, with a fine feminine perception both of the serious and ludicrous in character and feeling. But giving all due credit to her literary compositions, no one could see her act, without deciding at once that she possessed capacities which had been

but imperfectly developed in her writings, and that her genius was more especially calculated for the stage than for any other field in which her fine and rare powers could be exercised. We happened to be present on the evening of her first ap pearance, and received there a new impression of her imaginative power, and singular depth, intensity and subtlety of feeling. She trod the stage with a seem ing unconsciousness of the presence of an audience, and appeared to possess, not merely the power to produce an illusion in the minds of others that she was the character she embodied, but to be under the influence of that illusion herself-the greatest merit that can be awarded to an actress on her début.

The great merit of Mrs. Mowatt's act ing, and the highest merit of any acting, is the force and refinement of imagination she displays in the embodiment of character. Her mind, we should judge, is uncommonly flexible and fluid, and rises or falls into the moulds of character with singular ease. She reproduces the creation of the poet in her own imagination-makes all its thoughts and emotions real to herself-stamps on the expression of each the peculiar individuality she is representing, and loses all sense of herself in the vividness of her realization of the part. She ensouls as well as embodies her characters. This gives vital life to her personation, and distinguishes her from all those who merely avail themselves of the mechanical contrivances of elocution. A vivifying soul pervades and animates her acting, and makes itself "felt along the heart" of her audience. By conceiving character in the concrete, through the instinctive processes of imagination, she preserves the unity of character amid all the variety of its manifestation. This can never be done by the mere understanding. The custom of some actors, of deducing, by

logical rules, the character from the text, and then personating that deduction, makes their acting mechanical and lifeless, and leaves on the mind of the hearer no unity of impression. This individuality is especially difficult to preserve in those characters, in whom there is going on, through the play, a process of change or development-whose minds are modified by new positions and new motives -and in whom we trace the stream of the same individual being from the moment it is first ruffled by passion to the period when it sweeps and rushes on with the mad impetuosity of a torrent. The difference between understanding a part and conceiving it, measures the difference between the actor of talent and the actor of genius. We may admire the first, but we are conquered and borne away by the second. The actor of imagination also performs with more subtlety, gives more pertinence to all the refinements of the author's meaning, and fuses the different parts into a more proportioned and concrete whole, than can possibly be done by the most patient actor who follows the method of the understanding. As the understanding never yet created character, so it can never represent it. It will always work “ from the flesh inwards, instead of from the heart outwards."

In the most important intellectual requisite of acting, we therefore think Mrs. Mowatt to be preeminently gifted; and from the extreme ductility of her imagination, she is capable of indefinite improvement in her profession, and of embodying, eventually, almost all varieties of character. To this great mental advantage she joins singular advantages of person. Her form is slight, graceful and flexible, and her face fine and pure, with that strangeness in the expression which Bacon deemed essential to all beauty. In personal appearance she is altogether the most ideal-looking woman we ever saw on the stage. Her voice well justifies the impression which would be received from her appearance. In its general tone it is the perfection of clear sweetness, and is capable of great variety of modulation. She does not seem herself aware of all its capabilities, or fully to have mastered its expression. In passages of anguish, fear, horror, pride, supplication, she often brings out tones, which seem the very echoes of the heart's emotions, and which indicate the most remarkable powers of vocal expression.

In the last act of "The Bride of Lammermoor," and, especially, in the fourth act of "Romeo and Juliet," these latent capacities of voice are developed with wondrous effect. The exquisite beauty and purity of her voice, however, are best evinced in the expression of sentiment and pathos-in the clear, bird-like carol of tone with which she gives utterance to inward content and blissfulnessin the expression of affection gushing directly from the heart, or springing from it in wild snatches of music-in the sportive and sparkling utterance of thoughts and feelings steeped in the heart's most gladdening sunshine-and in that wide-wandering remoteness of tone which gives a kind of unearthly significance to objects viewed through the mystical light of imagination.

A few remarks on some of the characters in which Mrs. Mowatt appears will, we hope, justify the high estimate we have expressed of her capacity, by a reference to facts gathered from a scrutiny of her acting in each. One of her most pleasing and popular personations is Pauline, in Bulwer's "Lady of Lyons." In this we do not think she has even a rival. No actress that we have seen, English or American, approaches her in this character. Her conception of it is fresh and original, and in its embodiment she supplies even the deficiencies of the author, who is not much skilled in characterization. Though we, by no means, think that her Pauline is a fair measure of her powers, her representation of the part more than exhausts its whole capacity of effectiveness. She has seized, with the intuitive quickness of imagination, what Bulwer aimed to produce in the delineation of Pauline, and converted his intention into a living, breathing reality. In the third, fourth and fifth acts of the play, her acting is characterized by great force, refinement and variety. In the expression of that confusion of mind and motives, produced by a conflict of antagonist passions, each maddening the brain and tugging at the heart-strings, her whole action is masterly and original. Scorn, contempt, love, hatred, shame, fear, hope, pride, humility, despair, meet and part, and chase each other in tumultuous succession; every emotion, as it sweeps abruptly across her heart, mirrored in her face, speaking in her gesture-giving significance to every movement of her frame. The whole personation, commencing with the vain, proud,

romantic girl-conducting her through shame and mortification to the very verge of despair and death-her heart, after its first mad burst of rage, becoming the more beautiful and noble the more it is crushed, and finally ending, after her long ordeal of sorrow, in happiness and love is most powerful and effective. The character, as Mrs. Mowatt performs it, gives considerable play to a variety of emotions, ranging from the most graceful sentiment to deep passion, and is also full of ravishing beauties. In the second act, she displays that singular power of expressing insight in the world of imagination, which, in its various modifications by circumstance and character, lends a charm to all her personations. When Claude describes his imaginary gardens by the Lake of Como, she sees them as realities before her eyes-is blind to everything else; her face has that fine indefiniteness of look which represents the triumph of the sensuous imagination over the senses-the bloom and fragrance of the flowers, and the musical gush of the waterfalls, are the only objects before her mind and her whole soul seems absorbed in a soft and delicious dream. The effect is most exquisite, and it is so perfect that its meaning cannot but flash on the dullest and least imaginative auditor.

In the characters of Lady Teazle, Juliana, and "The Duchess," Mrs. Mowatt shows great talent for genteel Comedy. Her Lady Teazle, played here last summer to Placide's Sir Peter, was capital. The Duchess, in "Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady," is a part to which she does full justice, and she makes it very effective and brilliant. Juliana, however, in Tobin's "Honeymoon," is her best character in comedy. This gives more scope to her powers than the others. Her personation of it comes very near perfection. The felicity with which she keeps to the truth of character, is well illustrated in this part. Juliana is subject to some of the same passions and weaknesses as Pauline, though her individuality is different. Mrs. Mowatt

never suggests the character of the one in her representation of the other. Love, pride, shame, as she acts them in Pauline, have little in common with the same feelings as they appear in Juliana-so strong is her sense of the individuality of emotion. Her brisk, bright, sparkling acting in Tobin's peevish and shrewish heroine the quickness of tone, gesture

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and movement, with which she animates every part-the unconscious tact with which she gives continually the impression that, beneath all the vixenish outbreaks of the proud girl, there dwells purity and goodness of heart-make her personation of the character one of the most delightful we ever witnessed. Throughout the play there is nothing to interrupt the feeling of pleasure which she gives from the first. No person can have an idea of the variety of her acting, and the singular flexibility of her mind, without seeing her in two widely different characters-Juliana and Juliet. Each of these she represents to the life, and yet, from her acting in one, none could suppose her capacity to impersonate the other.

One of Mrs. Mowatt's most pathetic personations, is Mrs. Haller, in "The Stranger." This, to be appreciated, should be judged by comparison with her Mariana, in Knowles' play of "The Wife." The latter, as represented by Mrs. Mowatt, is most exquisite for its moral beauty. It leaves on the heart and imagination an impression of sweetness, simplicity, purity, devotedness and heroism, which cannot be forgotten. Though, in this character, she is not so perfect as in many others, in the minor graces of stage effect, it is still one of her very best parts, and one in which she will eventually gain great fame. The extreme subtlety of her imagination, and her capacity to represent feeling of the most ideal purity, are finely shown in it. We never appreciated the beauty of this character until we saw Mrs. Mowatt embody it. The contrast between Mariana the Wife, and Mrs. Haller the wife, as it appears in her personation of both, is felt to be as great as it is in nature. In Mrs. Haller there is a stifled, broken-hearted sorrow and repentance for guilt committed; in Mariana there is hardly the consciousness of the idea of guilt. Her mind is one of those "sacred fountains" of purity,

"Which, though shapes of ill May hover round its surface, glides in light, And takes no shadow from them." The last scene of the play, in which Mariana recognizes her brother, and the long, intense and soul-absorbing gaze with which she watches the last traces of vitality in his dying face, is almost sublime in its affectionateness.

The character of Lucy Ashton, in the