ast that it is Tybalt who is dead, and that Romeo
is exiled; which last causes her far greater grief than the loss of her
cousin. Her sorrow, however, is at once displaced by rage when the Nurse
speaks against her husband--

Shame come to Romeo!--

Blistered be thy tongue,
For such a wish! he was not born to shame.

The sorrow and anger here are well enacted, being neither overdone nor
forced. It is here at least shown that Miss Neilson can, when she
pleases, express great passions with that suppressed vehemence which
carries the cultivated spectator away far more than violence of voice
and gesture. Such suppression, with a view to producing greater effect
by leaving much to the excited imagination of the beholder, is not
practiced only by the tactful histrionic artist--it pervades all art. To
take a single brief example: the greatest sculptors, knowing that the
chisel could produce form, not color, have shrunk from indicating the
pupil of the eye in their statues, and left the eyeball smooth, because
the imagination was more pleased with entire absence of the organ than
with its imperfect representation. So with ultra-clamorous passion and
wild melodramatic action on the stage: both are better omitted than
expressed. These remarks are made here in connection with Miss Neilson's
first fair displays of passionate sorrow and sorrowful passion:
presently they may be applied again, less favorably, to her Juliet. In
her Rosalind, however--to refer to _As You Like It_ once more--she gives
another fine example of the power of suppressed, suggestive action
accompanying the expression of hot wrath. When the tyrant duke informs
her that she is banished from his court, she kneels before him in
supplication and begs to know the reason of his harsh decree. But the
instant he intimates that her father is a traitor, and she another as
his daughter, she springs to her feet, and in an attitude of intense
defiance, but without a motion of her folded arms, flings back her
scornful retort:

So was I when your highness took his dukedom;
So was I when your highness banished him:
Treason is not inherited, my lord;
Or, if we did derive it from our friends,
What's that to me? my father was no traitor.

Here again is a display of power without distortion or over-acting, such
as must give the actress fair title to celebrity.

Let us return now to Juliet and her approaching doom. There is a sad
scene