Autobiography of an Actress: Or, Eight Years on the Stage

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Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854 - Actresses - 448 pages

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Page 166 - Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams ; Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned That privilege by virtue.
Page 440 - I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
Page 444 - I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.
Page 436 - Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.
Page 303 - I have great hope in that: for in her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect Such as moves men; beside, she hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade.
Page 444 - To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart, To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold, Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold...
Page 120 - twas but the wind, Or the car rattling o'er the stony street; On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet But hark!
Page 100 - That, pledged on earth and seal'd above, Grows in the world's approving eyes, In friendship's smile and home's caress, Collecting all the heart's sweet ties Into one knot of happiness ! No, HINDA, no — thy fatal flame Is nursed in silence, sorrow, shame.
Page 437 - So that the right use of comedy will, I think, by nobody be blamed, and much less of the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue...
Page 219 - For ill can Poetry express Full many a tone of thought sublime, And Painting, mute and motionless, Steals but a glance of time. But by the mighty actor brought, Illusion's perfect triumphs come, — Verse ceases to be airy thought, And Sculpture to be dumb.

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