The youthful Forrest not only had nature in himself, but he was a careful student of nature in others. He used to walk behind old men, watching every movement, to attain the gait and peculiarities of age. He visited hospitals and asylums, and patiently observed the phases of weakness and death, the features and actions of maniacs. His reading was a model of precision and lucidity in the extrication of the sense of the words. One of his earlier critics said, “He grasps the meaning of a passage more firmly than any actor we know. He discloses the idea with exactness, energy, and fulness, leaving in this respect nothing to be desired. His recitation is as clear as a mathematical demonstration.” He had also an exquisite tenderness of feeling and utterance which penetrated the heart, and a power of intense mournfulness or delicious sadness which could always unseal the eyes of the sensitive. He studied the different forms of actual death with such minute attention that his stage deaths were so painfully true as to excite repugnance while they compelled admiration. The physical accompaniments were too literally exact. He had not yet learned that the highest artistic power lowers and absorbs the minor details in its broad grasp and conspicuous portrayal of the whole. The Natural School, as a rule, does not enough discriminate between the terror that paralyzes the brain and the horror that turns the stomach. In the part of Virginius, Forrest for some years had the hollow blade of the knife filled with a red fluid which, on the pressure of a spring as he struck his daughter, spurted out like blood following a stab. A lady fainted away as he played this scene in Providence, and, feeling that the act was artifice, and not art, he never afterwards repeated it. So it was nature, and not art, when Polus, the Roman tragedian, having to act a part of great pathos secretly brought in the urn the ashes of his own son. In distinction equally from artifice and from nature, art grasps the essential with a noble disregard of the accidental, and finely subordinates what is particular to what is general.