“Treading on air each step the soul displays,
The looks all lighten and the limbs all blaze.”
But after the dreadful doubt had ruined his peace, he grew so pale and haggard, wore so startled and dismal a look, was so self-absorbed in misery, that he appeared an incarnate comment on the descriptive words,—
“Look where he comes! Not poppy nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”
There was an imaginative vastness and unity in the soul of Othello which aggrandized his experiences and allowed him to do nothing by halves. Forrest so perceived and exemplified this as to make his performance come before the audience as a new revelation to them of the colossal and blazing extremes, the entrancing, maddening, and fatal extremes, to which human passions can mount. His love, his conflict with doubt, his melancholy, his wrath, his hate, his revenge, his remorse, his despair, each in turn absorbingly possesses him and floods the earth with heaven or hell.
The unrivalled speech of lamentation over his lost happiness he gave not, as many a famous actor has, partly in a tone of complaining vexation and partly with a noisy pomp of declamation. He began with an exquisite quality of tearful regret and sorrow which was a breathing requiem over the ruins of his past delights. The mournfulness of it was so sweet and chill that it seemed perfumed with the roses and moss growing over the tomb of all his love.
“I had been happy if the general camp,