Nothing occurred through the winter out of the ordinary routine, except his happy and most profitable intercourse with Edmund Kean, during the last engagement filled in Albany by that illustrious actor and unfortunate man. This encounter was of so much consequence to Forrest that we must pause a little over it. It will be recollected that he had, several years before, seen Kean perform a few nights in Philadelphia, and that he was filled with enthusiasm about him. But now the discipline and experience of five added years fitted him far more worthily to appreciate the genius and to profit from the startling methods and points of the tragedian whom many judges declare to have been the most original and electrifying actor that has ever stepped before the foot-lights. Edmund Kean, born under the ban of society, treated as a dog, beaten, starved, while yet an infant flung for a livelihood on his wits and tricks as a public performer, associating mostly with vagrants and adventurers, but occasionally with the best and highest, early became a wonder both in the elastic strength of his small body and in the penetrative power of his flashing mind. With sensibilities of extreme delicacy and passions of terrific energy he combined a natural and sedulously-cultivated ability of giving to the outer signs of inner states their utmost possible distinctness and intensity. Perhaps there never was, within his range, a greater master of the physiological language of the soul, one who set facial expression in more vivid relief. As a student of his art he went to no traditional school of posture, no frigid school of elocution, but to the original school of nature in the burning depths of his own mind and heart.