With tongue less gifted, of the pleasing sadness
Wrought in your deepest scenes of woe and madness?
Who hope by words to paint your Damon and your Lear?
Their noble forms before me pass,
Like breathing things of a living class.’
The longer I allude to the tragedian the stronger becomes the sadness that tinctures my feelings to think that he is no more, and that the existence of the gifts Nature had so liberally bestowed on him had to cease with the cessation of his pulse.”
Everything set down by the biographer in this volume has been stated in the simple spirit of truth. And if the pen that writes has distilled along the pages such a spirit of love for their subject as makes the reader suspect the writer possessed with a fond partiality, he asks, Why is it so? His love is but a response to the love he received, and to the grand and beautiful qualities he saw. A dried-up and malignant heart does not breathe such effusive words in such a sincere tone as those which, in 1869, Forrest wrote to Oakes: “The good news you send of the restored health of our dear friend Alger gives me inexpressible relief. Now I go into the country with abounding joy.”
The fortune Forrest had laboriously amassed would amount, it was thought, when it should all be made available, to upwards of a million dollars. It was found that in his will he had left the whole of it—excepting a few personal bequests—to found, on his beautiful estate of “Spring Brook,” about eight miles from the heart of Philadelphia, the Edwin Forrest Home, for the support of actors and actresses decayed by age or disabled by infirmity.
The trustees and executors have arranged the grounds and prepared the buildings, removed thither all the relics of the testator, his books, pictures, and statues, and made public announcement that the home is ready for occupation. Thus the greatest charity ever bequeathed in the sole interest of his own profession by any actor since the world began is already in active operation, and promises to carry the name it wears through unlimited ages. It pleasantly allies its American founder with the old tragedian Edward Alleyn, the friend of Shakspeare, who two hundred and fifty years ago established munificent institutions of knowledge and mercy, which have been growing ever since and are now one of the princeliest endowments in England.
Those who loved Forrest best had hoped for him that, reposing on his laurels, pointed out in the streets as the veteran of a hundred battles, the vexations and resentments of earlier years outgrown and forgotten, enjoying the calls of his friends, luxuriating in bookish leisure, overseeing with paternal fondness the progress of the home he had planned for the aged and needy of his profession, taking a proud joy in the prosperity and glory of his country and in the belief that his idolized art has before it here amidst the democratic institutions of America a destiny whose splendor and usefulness shall surpass everything it has yet known,—the days of his mellow and vigorous old age should glide pleasantly towards the end where waits the strange Shadow with the key and the seal. Then, they trusted, nothing in his life should have become him better than the leaving of it would. For, receding step by step from the stage and the struggle, he should fade out in a broadening illumination from behind the scenes, the murmur of applause reaching him until his ear closed to every sound of earth.