"
How shall I describe the last act? Those who read "Francesca" in its
published form can form no adequate idea of the enthusiasm in the
Coliseum that night. To them it is a skeleton; then it was clothed
with passionate flesh and blood, breathed, sobbed and wept in purest
pathos; to me, even now, as I read it again, it is charged with the
inspiration of that wonderful art, so true, so tender, that made its
last act a miracle. I saw old men sob, and young men bow their heads
to hide the emotion which they could not check. I saw that audience
which had come to criticise, tremble and break into tumultuous
weeping. Beside me, a greyheaded man was crying as any child.
Yet why do I go on? No one who saw Clarissa Lambert can ever
forget--no one who saw her not can ever imagine.
Tom had bowed his acknowledgments, the last flower had been flung,
the last cheer had died away as we stepped out into the Strand
together. The street was wrapped in the densest of November fogs.
So thick was it that the lamps, the shop windows, came into sight,
stared at us in ghostly weakness for a moment, and then were gone,
leaving us in Egyptian gloom.
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