her. She looked so beautiful in the little white bed. Her great
eyes, black, with weary white lids, used to follow me as I left the
hospital ward, and I could not always tear myself away from their dumb
beseechingness, but would turn back and sit down again by the bed. Once
she asked me if I would leave something belonging to me that she might
look at until I came again. I took off the amber and coral beads that I
was wearing at the time and gave them to her. Two days later I had a
letter from the nurse telling me that poor Hamlet was dead--that just
before she died, with closed eyes, and gasping for breath, she sent her
love to her "dear Miss Terry," and wanted me to know that the tall
lilies I had brought her on my last visit were to be buried with her,
but that she had wiped the coral and amber beads and put them in
cotton-wool, to be returned to me when she was dead. Poor "Hamlet"!

Quite as wonderful as the Temple Scene was the setting of the first act,
which represented the rocky side of a mountain with a glimpse of a
fertile table-land and a pergola with vines growing over it at the top.
The acting in this scene all took place on different levels. The hunt
swept past on one level; the entrance to the temple was on another. A
goatherd played upon a pipe. Scenically speaking, it was not Greece, but
Greece in Sicily, Capri, or some such hilly region.

Henry Irving was not able to look like the full-lipped, full-blooded
Romans such as we see in long lines in marble at the British Museum, so
he conceived his own type of the blend of Roman intellect and sensuality
with barbarian cruelty and lust. Tennyson was not pleased with him as
Synorix! _How_ he failed to delight in it as a picture I can't conceive.
With a pale, pale face, bright red hair, gold armor and a tiger-skin, a
diabolical expression and very thin crimson lips, Henry looked handsome
and sickening at the same time. _Lechery_ was written across his
forehead.

The first act was well within my means; the second was beyond them, but
it was very good for me to try and do it. I had a long apostrophe to the
goddess with my back turned to the audience, and I never tackled
anything more difficult. My dresses, designed by Mr. Godwin, one of them
with the toga made of that wonderful material which Arnott had printed,
were simple, fine and free.

I wrote to Tennyson's son Hallam after the first night that I knew his
father would be delighted with Henry's splendid p