Note 38 — JOURNAL. (continued 3)

I have acted Ophelia three times with my father, and each time, in that beautiful scene where his madness and his love gush forth together like a torrent swollen with storms, that bears a thousand blossoms on its troubled waters, I have experienced such deep emotion as hardly to be able to speak. The exquisite tenderness of his voice, the wild compassion and forlorn pity of his looks bestowing that on others which, above all others, he most needed; the melancholy restlessness, the bitter self-scorning; every shadow of expression and intonation was so full of all the mingled anguish that the human heart is capable of enduring, that my eyes scarce fixed on his ere they filled with tears; and long before the scene was over, the letters and jewel-cases I was tendering to him were wet with them. The hardness of professed actors and actresses is something amazing: after acting this part, I could not but recall the various Ophelias I have seen, and commend them for the astonishing absence of every thing like feeling which they exhibited. Oh, it made my heart sore to act it.