Kean's power over the feelings of his audiences seems scarcely to have been surpassed by any actor that ever trod the stage. Hosts of admirers speak of him even now with unabated enthusiasm.
The subjoined beautiful reflections and yet more admirable poetry are from an essay based oddly enough upon a version of one of the monosyllabic poems of Ausonius; a string of verses, in which the last monosyllable of each line forms the first of the next, and the first is the same as the last; so that they may be read over and over again without end. 'We take it,' writes Sands, 'as a good motto for a paper which we mean to write, without having any precise notion on what subject we shall descant. We mean to make, on something or other, 'a few plain and practical remarks,' as the Rev. Mr. —— says, when he means to preach a sermon five quarters of an hour long.' The paper thus lightly commenced, closes as follows:
'A MAN who lives out his threescore and ten years, or lingers beyond that period, must, in the common course of events, see the ordinary revolutions affected by time and death. At the middle of his career, he sees a flourishing family around him; friends and connections formed in his advancing course; attachments begun in sympathy, and cemented by interest. He lives on; and his children are scattered by the accidents of mortality, and their graves are in different countries. His friends have vanished from their former haunts, and the places that knew them, now know them no more for ever. 'He asks of the solitudes, where are they? and the hollow echo answers, Where?' There is no one to sympathize with his remembrances of the past; his infirmities become a grievance, or he thinks them so, to those around him; and he still feels that lingering attachment to life, which answers the philosopher's question, an mors malum sit, with the powerful evidence of consciousness. Hope and Memory delude the pilgrim in his journey, by the false colors with which they paint the scene before and behind him. 'Man never is, but always to be blest;' and as the future, depicted by the fancy only, presents unmingled visions of delight, the past, mellowed by time, loses the little inconveniences which jarred discordantly with the passing music of pleasure; and its remembrance makes us regret what when present we neglected. It was under the influence of such reflections, that the following lines were composed. They were written in a prophetic hour by one who died young, and willing to depart:
Delusive world! whose phantom throng
Still flit, with juggling smiles, along,
To cheat the aching sense;
Where, as in man's primeval tongue,
Joy hath no present tense!
Joy, decked in unsubstantial hues,
The impatient fool for e'er pursues,
Till when the form is nigh,
The enchantress fair no more he views,
And all her colors fly.
But lo! 'tis there! 'tis there, again!
He starts anew, on quest as vain—
The enchantress is not there!
But like a vampyre from the tombs,
Behind, once more, the form assumes
Its station in the air.
Thus Hope and Memory still delude;
Now with the future's fancied good,
Now with the fancied past;
Till comes eternal night to brood
Above them both at last!
While thus I mused, I heard a voice
Of sweet and solemn tone:
'O child of clay!' it said, 'rejoice,
Nor woo despair alone.
'For know thine age hath reached its prime:
There is a race of men
Who do but hail life's summer-time,
And sink to earth again.
With one swift flame their being burns,
And soon their dust to dust returns'—
Blest Spirit! tell me—when?