Says the queen,

"I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife;
I thought thy bride bed to have decked, sweet maid,
And not have strewed thy grave."

And finally Hamlet makes tempestuous public avowal of his love. For one moment, at the end, the curtain that hangs before the things that might have been is drawn aside. For that moment the play is the tragedy of Ophelia and not of Hamlet. So ends the poet's study-a girl, thrown underfoot in the press of men. Her story, as Mrs. Jameson says, would have our tears, not words.

O Rose of May!

Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!

CHILDHOOD.

It is some half-forgotten lay
That will not go, and will not stay,
Whose accents, gently rhym'd, I hear
Fainter and fainter year by year,
Like music mingling in a dream,
Like fleeting beauty scarcely seen,
Like thoughts of death for those whose lives

A shadowy memory still survives.

I know not what those words may be,
The secret of their melody,
And yet I clearly seem to feel
The thoughts of love that they reveal;
What poet's soul has found so well
Those golden chords I cannot tell,
Yet, though men smile, still am I sure
His life was quiet, calm and pure.

O time of half-forgotten lays,
O near, yet distant childhood days!
Land of the mystic poet's tongue,

Of dreams half dream'd and songs half sung!
Youth's hand, suspended, waits to feel
The softening prelude on him steal,
Before, cheer'd by that calm refrain,
He strikes life's sterner epic strain!

Burton J. Hendrick.

I

RECOLLECTIONS OF EDWIN BOOTH.

"That face which no man ever saw

And from his memory banished quite."

Sargent's portrait of Booth-ALDRICH.

"EDWIN BOOTH AS RICHELIEU."

WELL remember reading the playbills, late upon a snowy January afternoon eight years ago. There came a vaguely defined outline of the poetic figure as imagination pictured him; the lithograph of the wily Cardinal, upon the bill board, was surrounded by a halo of snow flakes through which the arc light shot its gleams; and the people passed silently to and fro, muffled like hooded monks.

Nor is the grey morning when the box sheet was opened a matter to be forgotten. The tiled lobby of Macauley's was hung round with the familiar prints and photographs of many a favorite, and the manager, with shrewd insight, had placed an engraving of Booth in a prominent position. One person stood gazing at it in boundless admiration for fully half an hour and nearly lost his turn thereby. Your school boy is your true hero-worshipper.

A reference to the Courier-Journal of that date would show that Macauley's held, the Richelieu evening, the largest audience in the history of that venerable playhouse. Society wore its best patch, powder, and patent leather for the occasion, as a man with an opera glass could easily tell, a good half hour before the performance. Then there was that delicious sensation combined of the rustle of silks, the fragrance of mingled perfumes, and the murmur of subdued conversation. Is there a moment in life more delightful than that very brief one before the curtain rises?

One passes rapidly in recollection by the opening scene in the drinking-house with the rattle of dice, the clinking of glasses, and the gay ribaldry of the courtiers. The scenes part, disclosing Richelieu's closet, when suddenlythere he comes, the shrewd priest-statesman-leaning upon the arm of Joseph, the Capuchin. He was dressed in cardinal robes, with deep lace collar and cuffs, and wore long, iron-grey hair, and French moustache, and imperial. He began speaking his lines with perfect ease as if entirely unconscious of the hearty applause. Booth's smooth, melodious voice seems still an inseparable attribute of the oily "old fox," as Baradas calls him; and when, at the close of the first act, it rose in a passion of patriotism in the lines,

"-Sweet France,

Who shall proclaim divorce for thee and me,"

we feel that thrill of enthusiasm which makes us, for the future, not the actor's critics, but his intense admirers. The closing lines left a keen feeling of regret and one did not reflect, in those boyhood days, that Julie-unsullied rose of girlhood, loveliest of all maids of Francewore rouge upon her cheeks and perhaps had a great, ugly patch of it upon her heart.

And Hamlet-can one ever forget Booth's Hamlet ? He played the part quite without make-up, and it was a pleasure to see him thoroughly undisguised, though the ravages of time were all too painfully evident. The melancholy prince was, in Booth's interpretation, the "Prince of gentlemen," and it was most fitting that so ideal a conception could be embodied in the man of all men who made the theatre a temple. With him as high priest, its Holy of Holies was never defiled. The part of Hamlet seemed written for him, so perfectly did it fit his endowments of person and intellect. Upon one occasion, some five years ago, I remember him returning after the passionate "Get thee to a nunnery," in the soliloquy scene, and kissing the bowed head of Ophelia. It was an expression of the deepest things in the man and in the character he played. Indeed it was in that wonderful depth of nature that he surpassed every actor of his day. No wonder the manly Horatio could give unqualified allegiance to such a Hamlet. And Ophelia, gentle lady,

went mad, and finally killed herself, for grief and love of him. Yet what a sublimity there was in the graceful person as he lay stabbed by Laertes' poisoned weapon.

"The rest is silence."

Alas, we have heard those lips pronounce the words for the last time.

Into nearly every part he played Booth infused some of his own nobility. As Othello he completely won our sympathy, as Brutus he was our ideal of a noble Roman, as Macbeth he excited the profoundest pity. But as Shylock and Iago he awakened the deepest hatred. Nevertheless it was one of his greatest successes, as an actor, that none of his rôles were more flawlessly done than these. They were triumphs of art.

Of Booth's King Lear it may be said the highest pinnacle of his power was reached. Mr. Winter thought this would have been considered his highest achievement had not his Hamlet been an accepted ideal. Booth's appearance as Lear was that of a man in lusty old age. He was a kingly figure, and the meagre five feet eight inches did not detract from the royalty of his person. It was Booth's aim to develop, in the barbarous king, that verge between madness and sanity which is, perhaps, the saddest thing, and this appeared with wonderful power in the reunion with Cordelia. In the storm-scenes and in the terrible curse he was, despite his ungovernable rage, the incarnation of majesty; upon the heath with the blind Gloster he was a raving madman, the recollection of whom is haunting; and yet there rings through the memory of it all the heartbroken cry,

"Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little."

Those who heard that wail of anguish will never forget it this side of the grave,

"Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little."

There is all the human agony in that cry.

One, the last performance, will always linger tenderly in memory. Booth was playing Richelieu at the Broadway Theater, New York, and the performance was the first after Mr. Barrett's untimely death. We passed his picture draped in mourning upon an easel in the lobby and the noble eyes of Booth in the frame opposite looked over at it sadly, some one thought, as David might have looked at the dead face of Jonathan.

Upon the opening of the play it became evident that our actor was much broken, the weakness of the aged Cardinal was too real. It was indeed a painful sight. One old playgoer left the theater at the end of the first act with a look of deep emotion on his face. Although intellect was triumphant, and hidden depths of the play were marvellously revealed, some of us were not sorry to see the last act close.

The audience lingered, the curtain lifted once more, and again the Prince of Players stood before us bowing gravely. His eyes swept the balcony where we sat-those great majestic eyes, who can forget them?-then the curtain fell.

Chauncey Wetmore Wells.