"I acted like a wretch, of course; how could I do otherwise? Oh, Juliet! vision of the south! rose of the garden of the earth! was this the glorious hymn that Shakspeare hallowed to your praise? was this the mingled strain of Love's sweet going forth, and Death's dark victory, over which my heart and soul have been poured out in wonder and ecstacy?--How I do loathe the stage! these wretched, tawdry, glittering rags, flung over the breathing forms of ideal loveliness; these miserable, poor, and pitiful substitutes for the glories with which poetry has invested her magnificent and fair creations--the glories with which our imagination reflects them back again. What a mass of wretched mumming mimickry acting is. Pasteboard and paint, for the thick breathing orange groves of the south; green silk and oiled parchment, for the solemn splendor of her noon of night; wooden platforms and canvass curtains, for the solid marble balconies, and rich dark draperies of Juliet's sleeping chamber, that shrine of love and beauty; rouge, for the startled life-blood in the cheek of that young passionate woman; an actress, a mimicker, a sham creature, me, in fact, or any other one, for that loveliest and most wonderful conception, in which all that is true in nature, and all that is exquisite in fancy, are moulded into a living form. To _act_ this! to _act_ Romeo and Juliet!--horror! horror! how I do loathe my most impotent and unpoetical craft!" Vol. ii. pp. 16-17. In another and sadder strain, there are many beautiful portions, from which we can only select the following--and with this our extracts must end: "'Tis strange, that Messenger Bird threw more than a passing gloom over me. If the dead do indeed behold those whom they have loved, with loving eyes and fond remembrance, do not the sorrows, the weariness, the toiling, the despairing of those dear ones rise even into the abodes of peace, and wring the souls of those who thence look down upon the earth, and see the wo and anguish suffered here? Or, if they do not feel,--if, freed from this mortal coil, they forget all they have suffered, all that we yet endure, oh! then what four-fold trash is human love! what vain and miserable straws are all the deep, the dear, the grasping affections twined in our hearts' fibres,--mingled with our blood!--how poor are all things--how beggarly is life. Oh, to think that while we yet are bowed in agony and mourning over the dead,--while our bereaved hearts are aching, and our straining eyes looking to that heaven, beyond which we think they yet may hear our cries, they yet may see our anguish, the dead, the loved, the mourned, nor see, nor hear; or if they do, look down with cold and careless gaze upon the love that lifts our very souls in desperate yearning towards them." Vol. ii. pp. 54-55.