The Last Leaf: Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and EuropeHosmer, James Kendall
History
The Last Leaf: Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe
Hosmer, James Kendall
History; United States -- History
fresh young voices and an orchestra whose members played in the
Pierian Sodality. The merriment of the lines was more robust than
delicate, but with some pruning it passed. The bill of announcement,
which was hung up in the Pudding room, and which possibly is still
preserved, was very elaborately and handsomely designed, and I think
was the work of Alexander Agassiz, who had much skill of that kind.
The performers were all strenuous and some capable, but the hit of the
evening was Phillips Brooks, who personated the giantess Glumdalca to
perfection. He was then nineteen, and had reached his full stature.
He was attired in flowing skirts and befitting bodice, and wore a
towering head-dress of feather dusters or something similar, which
swept the ceiling as he strode. I had been cast originally for the
Queen, but it was afterwards judged that I had special qualifications
for the part of Princess. Like the youths in Comus, my unrazored lips
in those days were as smooth as Hebe's, and I had a slenderness that
was quite in keeping. Dressed in an old brocade gown, an heirloom from
the century before, with a lofty white wig, and proper patches upon my
pink cheeks, I essayed the rôle of _une belle dame sans merci_.
Brooks and I were rivals for the affection of Tom Thumb, and I do not
recall which succeeded. The tragedy was most extreme. In the closing
scene the entire cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with
a picturesque heap of slain. We were not so very dead, for the victims
near the foot-lights in order to give the curtain room to fall,
drew up their legs or rolled out of the way, in a spirit of polite
accommodation. The most impressive part of the spectacle was the
defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as
Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the
floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity. The
piece was so much of a success that we performed it again at the house
of Theodore Lyman, in Brookline,--and still again, at Chickering Hall
in Boston.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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