“As the lamp guards the flame, so the bare, marble halls
     Of the Parthenon keep, in their desolate space,
     The memory of Phidias enshrined in their walls. 
     And Praxiteles’ child, the young Venus, yet calls
     From the altar, where, smiling, she still holds her place,
     The centuries conquered to worship her grace.

    “Thus from age after age, while new life they receive,
     To rest at God’s feet the old glories are gone;
     And the accents of genius their echoes still weave
     With the great human voice, till their speech is but one. 
     And of thee, dead but yesterday, all thy fame leaves
     But a cross in the dim chapel’s darkness, alone.

    “A cross and oblivion, silence, and death! 
     Hark! the wind’s softest sob; hark! the ocean’s deep breath! 
     Hark! the fisher boy singing his way o’er the plains! 
     Of thy glory, thy hope, thy young beauty’s bright wreath,
     Not a trace, not a sigh, not an echo remains.”

Those Garcia sisters were among the most remarkable people of their day, not only for their peculiar high artistic gifts, their admirable musical and dramatic powers, but for the vivid originality of their genius and great general cultivation.  Malibran danced almost as well as she sang, and once took a principal part in a ballet.  She drew and painted well, as did her sister Pauline Viardot, whose spirited caricatures of her friends, and herself were admirable specimens both of likenesses and of humorous talent in delineating them.  Both sisters conversed brilliantly, speaking fluently four languages, and executed the music of different nations and composers with a perception of the peculiar character of each that was extraordinary.  They were mistresses of all the different schools of religious, dramatic, and national compositions, and Gluck, Jomelli, Pergolesi, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Scotch and Irish melodies, Neapolitan canzonette, and the popular airs of their own country, were all rendered by them with equal mastery.

To resume my story (which is very like that of the knife-grinder).  When I returned to the stage, many years after I had first appeared on it, I restored the beautiful end of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as he wrote it (in spite of Garrick and the original story), thinking it mere profanation to intrude sharp discords of piercing agony into the divine harmony of woe with which it closes.

                   “Thus with a kiss I die,”
    “Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead,”

are full enough of bitter-sweet despair for the last chords of that ineffable, passionate strain—­the swoon of sorrow ending that brief, palpitating ecstasy, the proper, dirge-like close to that triumphant hymn of love and youth and beauty.  All the frantic rushing and tortured writhing and uproar of noisy anguish of the usual stage ending seemed utter desecration to me; but Garrick was an actor, the first of actors, and his death-scene of the lovers and ending of the play is much more theatrically effective than Shakespeare’s.