intentness, united with undeniable beauty, that recall the deadly
nightshade among flowers and Keats's "Lamia" among poems. The portrait
would fully interpret the poem, She looked the lovely Lamia upon the
verge of flight, at the instant when she felt the calm, inexorable eye
of criticism and detection. In a moment, while you gaze, that form
will be prone, those bright, cold eyes malignant, that wily grace will
undulate into motion and glide away. You feel that there is no human
depravity that Rachel could not adequately represent. Perhaps you
doubt if she could be Desdemona or Imogen.

Rachel is great, but there is something greater. It is not an entirely
satisfactory display of human power, even in its own way. Her triumph
is that of an actress. It is only an intellectual success. For however
subtly dramatic genius may seize and represent the forms of human
emotion, yet the representation is most perfect--not, indeed, as art,
but as a satisfaction of the heart--when the personal character of the
artist interests those emotions to himself, and thus sympathetically
affects the audience. Rachel's Mary is a perfect portrait of Mary; but
it is only a picture, after all, that expresses the difference in
feeling between the impression of her personation and that which will
be derived from another woman. The fiercer and darker passions of
human nature are depicted by her with terrible force-power. They throb
with reality; but in the soft, superior shades you still feel that it
is emotion, intellectually discerned.

Such facts easily explain the present defection of Paris from Rachel.
Ristori has come up from Italy, and with one woman's smile, "full of
the warm South", she has lured Paris to her feet. There is no more
sudden and entire desertion of a favorite recorded in all the annals
of popular caprice. The feuilletonists, who are a power in Paris, have