Page:Mrs. Siddons (IA mrssiddons00kennrich).pdf/85

Rh Mrs. Siddons had the good fortune still to play to audiences who were in the full enjoyment of their natural and critical powers of appreciation. She bent all her powers to calling forth their emotions. She touched them to the quick with her pathos and power. The audience surrendered at discretion to the summons of the young enchantress. Her own simple account of it all is very attractive; and afterwards, in the history of her life, when a little hardness, or a rather too abrupt assertion of superiority, is to be regretted, we turn to this spontaneous, almost girlish account of her first triumph—through which we can see the smiles beaming, the tears glistening—with pleasure and relief.

"I reached my own quiet fireside," she says, "on retiring from the scene of reiterated shouts and plaudits. I was half dead; and my joy and thankfulness were of too solemn and overpowering a nature to admit of words, or even tears. My father, my husband, and myself sat down to a frugal neat supper in a silence uninterrupted except by exclamations of gladness from Mr. Siddons. My father enjoyed his refreshments, but occasionally stopped short, and, laying down his knife and fork, lifting up his venerable face, and throwing back his silver hair, gave way to tears of happiness. We soon parted for the night; and I, worn out with continually broken rest and laborious exertion, after an hour's retrospection (who can conceive the intenseness of that reverie?), fell into a sweet and profound sleep, which lasted to the middle of the next day. I arose alert in mind and body."

And so the seven long years spent in tempering her genius, in working to gain strength and confidence, had borne their result, for we will not allow, as