Mrs. Bury made a grave mistake in choosing for her second debut her great part of Juliet; for she had outlived the possibility of playing it as she played it at that period of her life when her soul readily melted in the divine glow of youthful passion and flowed into the character, taking its perfect shape, rounded and smooth and fair.  Through long years of sorrow and unrest, she had now to toil back to that golden time,—­and there was a sort of sharpness and haggardness about her acting, a singular tone of weariness, broken by starts and bursts of almost preternatural power.  Except in scenes and sentiments of pathos, where she had lost nothing, the last, fine, evanishing tints, the delicate aroma of the character, were wanting in her personation.  It was touched with autumnal shadows,—­it was comparatively hard and dry, not from any inartistic misapprehension of the poet’s ideal, but because the fountain of youth in Zelma’s own soul ran low, and was choked by the dead violets which once sweetened its waters.

She felt all this bitterly that night, ere the play was over; and though her audience generously applauded and old friends congratulated her, she never played Juliet again.

Yet, even in the darker and sterner parts, in which she was once so famous, she was hardly more successful now.  In losing her bloom and youthful fulness of form, she had not gained that statuesque repose, or that refined essence of physical power and energy, which sometimes belongs to slenderness and pallor.  She was often strangely agitated and unnerved when the occasion called most for calm, sustained power,—­at times, glancing around wildly and piteously, like a haunted creature.  Her passion was fitful and strained,—­the fire of rage flickered in her eye, her relaxed lips quivered out curses, her hand shook with the dagger and spilled the poison.  Her sorrows, real and imaginary, seemed to have broken her spirit with her heart.

But in anything weird and supernatural, awful with vague, unearthly terrors, she was greater than ever.  Whenever, in her part of Lady Macbeth, she came to the sleep-walking scene, that shadowy neutral ground between death and life, where the perturbed, burdened spirit moans out its secret agony, she gave startling token of the genius which had electrified and awed her audiences of old.  A solemn stillness pervaded the house; every eye followed the ghost-like gliding of her form, every ear hung upon the voice whose tones could sound the most mysterious and awful depths of human grief and despair.

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