Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/99

76 life; yet there were mutterings, not loud but deep, over the hated Spaniard. Captain Walker, the filibuster, had been in that neighborhood. There was talk of annexation, but the trouble had not come yet. So I remember the island in perhaps its period of greatest prosperity, and certainly when it was one of the gayest and most agreeable of winter sojourns.

New York had three great visitors within the two years after my wedding journey. They were Rachel, Thackeray, and Fanny Kemble. Each a memory for a lifetime.

It was after a tiresome journey from our country place, one October evening, that, making a hasty toilet, I went to the theatre to see Rachel in Phèdre. I did not know that I was to have this supreme pleasure so soon, although I knew I should see her sometime. So incoherent were my expectations that I thought my early memorizing of the great play would help me to understand her and to measure the greatness of her acting.

I had been made, when studying French, to memorize those lofty Alexandrines of Racine's masterpiece; therefore the story of Phèdre was very familiar. Remembering that the goddess had condemned the poor queen to fall in love with her stepson, I pictured her as rather an elderly person, perhaps a sort of Mrs. Nickleby. Who, then, was this young, sorrowful woman coming in with tragic face, dragging after her, as if its weight were insupportable, the long crimson mantle of a queen? Who was this dark-eyed creature, so young, so lovely, who sank into her imperial seat, the crimson mantle draped behind her, throwing out her beautiful arms and her delicate little head? The lover, an ugly, big-headed