wn of morning, but a dawn whose purple clouds
already announce the thunder of a sultry day."

The stormy acting of the elder Kean in _Richard III._--that epitome of
ambition and bloodshed--was said to produce the effect of reading
Shakespeare by flashes of lightning: in _Romeo and Juliet_ the first two
acts are illumined only by the soft moonlight of love, and we are not
startled by the lightning of tragedy until it gleams upon the bloody
blade of Tybalt in the beginning of the third act: then Love and Death
join hands, and move for a time with equal step across the stage.
Finally come the poisoning and self-slaughters, and in the
representation the curtain falls upon a corse-strewn graveyard, where
Death reigns alone. Sad contrast to the lighted ball-room where the
lovers first looked into each other's eyes--to the fair garden that lay
at midnight "all Danae to the stars"--to the moon-silvered balcony from
which Juliet leaned in her loveliness as she exchanged with Romeo her
earliest vows!

Beneath Italian skies girls spring with sudden leap to womanhood, and
the seed of the tender passion hardly drops into the heart before it
buds and blooms, a perfect flower. Though the actual lapse of time
represented in the play occupies only a few days, Juliet in that brief
period must assume several distinct characters. We see her first the
coy, heart-whole maiden, the cherished heiress of a patrician house:
soon the blind bow-boy launches his shaft, and, quick as thought, she is
passionately, impulsively, enduringly in love; then we see her but a few
hours a bride, with black sorrow creeping already to darken her
happiness; her kinsman is slain, Romeo banished, and the coy maiden is
changed at once to the devoted wife, capable of any sacrifice that will
enable her to rejoin her husband, then follow the fearful drinking of
the philter, the miscarriage of the Friar's scheme, and the death of the
lovers, who seek in the grave that union denied them on earth. What
varied qualities and acts are clustered here!--simplicity, love, hope,
fear, courage, despair, suicide. In the whole range of Shakespeare's
female characters there is none so difficult to portray--none requiring
such a combination of beauty and talent; and we need not marvel that the
part of Juliet is rarely attempted, and still more rarely with success.

That Miss Neilson was successful during her recent short engagement at
the Walnut Street Theatre may be inferred, not