into the Grand Canal was a shining streak of silver.  The air was balmy and absolutely still; no more perfect setting to Shakespeare or to Juliet could have been imagined.  Paul sat at a little table in front of the rest of us; he was to read Romeo and the Nurse in the scenes she had chosen, while in the background were the Worralls and Lucy Bretherton (the little crippled sister), Mr. Wallace, and myself.  She did the balcony scene, the morning scene with Romeo, the scene with the nurse after Tybalt’s death, and the scene of the philtre.  There is an old sundial in the garden, which caught the moonbeams.  She leaned her arms upon it, her eyes fixed upon the throbbing moonlit sky, her white brocaded dress glistening here and there in the pale light—­a vision of perfect beauty.  And when she began her sighing appeal—­

“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”

—­it seemed to me as if the night—­the passionate Italian night—­had found its voice—­the only voice which fitted it.

’Afterwards I tried as much as possible to shake off the impressions peculiar to the scene itself to think of her under the ordinary conditions of the stage, to judge her purely as an actress.  In the love scenes there seemed hardly anything to find fault with.  I thought I could trace in many places the influence of her constant dramatic talks and exercises with Paul.  The flow of passion was continuous and electric, but marked by all the simpleness, all the sweetness, all the young winsome extravagance which belong to Juliet.  The great scene with the Nurse had many fine things in it; she has evidently worked hard at it line by line, and that speech of Juliet’s, with its extraordinary dramatic capabilities—­

“Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?”—­

was given with admirable variety and suppleness of intonation.  The dreary sweetness of her

“Banished! that one word banished!”

still lives with me, and her gestures as she paced restlessly along the little strip of moonlit path.  The speech before she takes the potion was the least satisfactory of all; the ghastliness and horror of it are beyond her resources as yet; she could not infuse them with that terrible beauty which Desforets would have given to every line.  But where is the English actress that has ever yet succeeded in it?

We were all silent for a minute after her great cry—­

“Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, I drink to thee!”—­

had died upon our ears.  And then, while we applauded her, she came forward listlessly, her beautiful head drooping, and approached Paul like a child that has said its lesson badly.

’"I can’t do it, that speech; I can’t do it!”

’"It wants more work,” said Paul; “you’ll get it.  But the rest was admirable.  You must have worked very hard!”

’"So I have,” she said, brightening at the warmth of his praise.  “But Diderot is wrong, wrong, wrong!  When I could once reach the feeling of the Tybalt speech, when I could once hate him for killing Tybalt in the same breath in which I loved him for being Romeo, all was easy; gesture and movement came to me; I learnt them, and the thing was done.”