It is impossible when the situation is our own to be satisfied with ourselves: passion and timidity alternately transport and check us--inspire us either with too much bitterness or too much submission; but to appear perfect without affectation; to unite calm to sensibility, which too frequently destroys it; in a word, to exist for a moment in the sweetest reveries of the heart; such was the pure enjoyment of Corinne in performing tragedy. She united to this pleasure that of all the plaudits she received; and her look seemed to place them at the feet of Oswald, at the feet of him whose simple approval she valued more than all her fame. Corinne was happy, at least for a moment! for a moment, at least, she experienced at the price of her repose, those delights of the soul which till then she had vainly wished for, and which she would ever have to regret! Juliet in the third act becomes privately, the wife of Romeo. In the fourth, her parents wishing to force her to marry another, she determines to take the opiate which she receives from the hand of a friar, and which is to give her the appearance of death. All the motions of Corinne, her disturbed gait, her altered accent, her looks, sometimes animated and sometimes dejected, painted the cruel conflict of fear and love, the terrible images which pursued her at the idea of being transported alive to the tomb of her ancestors, and the enthusiasm of passion, which enabled a soul, so young, to triumph over so natural a terror. Oswald felt an almost irresistible impulse to fly to her aid. At one time she lifted her eyes towards heaven, with an ardour which deeply expressed that need of divine protection, from which no human being was ever free. At another time, Lord Nelville thought he saw her stretch her arms towards him to ask his assistance--he rose up in a transport of delirium, and then sat down immediately, brought to his senses by the astonished looks of those about him; but his emotion became so strong that it could no longer be concealed. In the fifth act, Romeo, who believes Juliet dead, lifts her from the tomb before she awakes and presses her to his heart. Corinne was clad in white, her black hair dishevelled, and her head inclined upon Romeo with a grace, and nevertheless an appearance of death, so affecting and so gloomy, that Oswald felt himself shaken with the most opposite impressions. He could not bear to see Corinne in the arms of another, and he shuddered at beholding the image of her whom he loved, apparently deprived of life; so that in fact he felt, like Romeo, that cruel combination of despair and love, of death and pleasure, which makes this scene the most agonising that ever was represented on a stage. At length, when Juliet awakes in this tomb, at the foot of which her lover has just immolated himself, when her first words in her coffin, beneath these funeral vaults, are not inspired by the terror which they ought to cause, when she exclaims: