between them. In the
third act there is a beautiful love-scene between Edgar and Lucy, the
dialogue being especially felicitous in tenderness and grace and fraught
with that reverential quality, that condition of commingled ecstasy and
nobleness, which is always characteristic of the experience of this
passion in pure natures. Lady Ashton's interruption of their happiness
and the subsequent parting have a vigorous dramatic effect. The
character of Lucy has been much strengthened, so that it differs from
that of the original precisely as Desdemona differs from Ophelia; and
the change is an improvement. The fourth act opens with "a song of
choristers heard outside." The letters of Lucy and Edgar have been
intercepted. The lady has been told that her lover is false. The suit of
Bucklaw has been urged. The authority of the stern mother has prevailed
over her daughter's will. It is the old story. "The absent are always
wrong"--and Ravenswood is absent. Lucy Ashton yields to her fate. The
marriage contract between Lucy and Bucklaw has just been signed when
Ravenswood bursts into the group. From that point the action is
animated equally with celerity and passion. The misery of Ravenswood
utters itself in a swift stream of burning words. The grief of Lucy ends
tragically in a broken heart and sudden death. The fight between Bucklaw
and Ravenswood clashes for a moment but is abruptly finished on the
moonlit sands, and Edgar is seen to leap down from a rock and rush away
toward the manor, where, as his dying foe has told him, the faithful and
innocent Lucy lies dead. He disappears and comes no more; but his old
servant takes up from the beach a single black plume--the feather of a
raven--which the tide has washed ashore, and which is the last relic and
emblem of the vanished master of Ravenswood.

The tragedy is kindred, as to its spirit, with _Romeo and Juliet_, and
like that representative poem of love and death it is intensely
passionate, sombre, and lamentable. The first and second acts of it pass
in almost unrelieved shadow. It begins with a funeral; it incorporates
the ingredients of misery, madness, and death; it culminates in a fatal
duel; and it ends in a picture of mortal desolation, qualified only by a
mute suggestion of spiritual happiness conveyed by the pictorial emblem
of the promise of immortality. It is a poetical tragedy, conceived in
the spirit and written in the manner of the old masters of the poetic
art. Th