Her friends advised her to become an actress, and she went diligently to work, not allowing herself to despond over that first great disappointment. For the next seven years, she worked faithfully learning the new profession from the very bottom. "I became aware," she said, "that one could never sail a ship by entering at the cabin windows; he must serve and learn his trade before the mast." In that way she learned hers, playing minor parts, doing cheerfully the drudgery of her profession, refusing all offers for more important work until she felt herself thoroughly capable of undertaking it. One would wish that her example might be taken to heart by her sisters of the present day. At last her chance came. In 1842, William C. Macready, the great English tragedian, visited the United States, and in Charlotte Cushman he found a splendid support. Indeed, she divided the honors with him. A year later, she went to London and won immense applause. "Since the first appearance of Edmund Keane, in 1814," said a London journal, in speaking of her first night as "Bianca," "never has there been such a debut on the stage of an English theatre." For eighty-four nights she appeared with Edwin Forrest. "All my successes put together," she wrote to her mother, "would not come near my success in London." In the winter of 1845 she tried one of the most daring experiments ever made by an actress, appearing as Romeo to her sister, Susan Cushman's, Juliet. It was a notable success. Her deep contralto voice made it possible for her to give a complete illusion of the young and handsome lover. She played other male characters in after years, notably Hamlet, and created a deep impression in them. Her sister was a lovely girl, and an accomplished actress, and their "Romeo and Juliet" ran for two hundred nights. Susan Cushman would no doubt also have won high fame as an actress, but she soon retired from the stage, marrying the distinguished chemist and author, James Sheridan Muspratt, of Liverpool. Charlotte Cushman returned to America in the fall of 1849, and was received with acclamation. There was never any question, after that, of her position as the greatest English-speaking actress, and that position she easily maintained until her death. She gathered wealth as well as fame, built a villa at Newport, and in 1863 earned nearly nine thousand dollars for the United States Sanitary Commission by benefit performances. Energetic, resolute, faithful, impatient of any achievement but the highest, she seemed the very embodiment of many of Shakespeare's greatest creations. She possessed a strange, and weird genius, akin, in some respects, to that of Edwin Booth, and her delineation of the sublime, the beautiful, the terrible has never been surpassed. A noble interpreter of noble minds, Charlotte Cushman stands for the supreme achievement of the actress.