No visual shade of some one lost,
    But he, the spirit himself, may come
    Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
  Spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost.
In Memoriam, XCII.  A. TENNYSON.

STAGE, THE.

  Where is our usual manager of mirth? 
  What revels are in hand?  Is there no play,
  To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v.  Sc. 1.  SHAKESPEARE.

  Prologues, like compliments, are loss of time;
  ’Tis penning bows and making legs in rhyme.
Prologue to Crisp’s Tragedy of Virginia.  D. GARRICK.

  Prologues precede the piece in mournful verse,
  As undertakers walk before the hearse.
Prologue to Apprentice.  D. GARRICK.

  On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting,
  ’Twas only that when he was off, he was acting.
Retaliation.  O. GOLDSMITH.

  The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give. 
  For we that live to please, must please to live.
Prologue.  Spoken by Mr. Garrick on Opening Drury
  Lane Theatre, 1747.  DR. S. JOHNSON.

  To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
  To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
  To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
  Live o’er each scene, and be what they behold—­
  For this the tragic Muse first trod the stage.
Prologue to Addison’s Cato.  A. POPE.

               As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
  After a well-graced actor leaves the stage,
  Are idly bent on him that enters next,
  Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
Richard II., Act v.  Sc. 2.  SHAKESPEARE.

  Is it not monstrous that this player here,
  But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
  Could force his soul so to his own conceit
  That from her working all his visage wanned?
Hamlet, Act ii.  Sc. 2.  SHAKESPEARE.

  What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
  That he should weep for her?  What would he do,
  Had he the motive and the cue for passion
  That I have?  He would drown the stage with tears.
Hamlet, Act ii.  Sc. 2.  SHAKESPEARE.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
Merchant of Venice, Act i.  Sc. 1.  SHAKESPEARE.

                           I have heard
  That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
  Have by the very cunning of the scene
  Been struck so to the soul, that presently
  They have proclaimed their malefactions.

* * * * *

The play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.
Hamlet, Act ii.  Sc. 2.  SHAKESPEARE.

  Lo, where the stage, the poor, degraded stage,
  Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age.
Curiosity.  C. SPRAGUE.