“There was something so mild, so pure, so Christian-like, in this lady, that her passing away from us is but a translation from earth to Heaven, like a flower blooming here for awhile to find eternal blossom there.

“Kind, gentle, with a hand open to charity, she did not remain at home awaiting the call of the destitute and suffering, but when the storms and the tempests of winter came and the poor were suffering, bearing their poverty and wretchedness in silence, she came forth unsolicited to aid them. We could name many instances of this; but she, who while living did not wish her charities known, receives her reward from One who reads the human heart and sways the destinies of mankind. The writer of this speaks feelingly of one whom it was a pleasure and a happiness to know. If ever a pure spirit left its earthly tenement to follow father, mother, brothers, and sisters to the home ‘eternal in the skies,’ it was that of Eleanora Forrest. There are many left to mourn her loss, but only one of kindred remains to grieve. To him the knowledge of her many virtues, sisterly affection, and the bright hereafter, must bring that peace no friendly aid can effect. Let us remember, in our hours of affliction, that

The revolutions of his tempestuous blood, the resentful memory of wrongs, the keen perception of insincerity, shallowness, and evanescence, and the want of any grounded faith in a future life gave Forrest many hours of melancholy, of bitterness, and almost of despair. But he never, not even in the darkest hour, became a misanthrope or an atheist. In one of his commonplace books he had copied these lines which he was often heard to quote:

A few of his characteristic expressions in his depressed moods may have interest for the reader:

“Is there then no rest but in the grave? Rest without the consciousness of rest? The rest of annihilation?”

“I am very sad and disheartened at the iniquitous decisions of these juries and judges. I could willingly die now with an utter contempt for this world and a perfect indifference to my fate in the next.”

“I wish the great Day of Doom were not a chimera. What a solace it would be to all those whom man has so deeply wronged!”

“This human life is a wretched failure, and the sooner annihilation comes to it the better.”

While these impulsive phrases reveal his intense and unstable sensibility, they must be taken with great allowance, or they will do injustice to his better nature. They are transitory phases of experience betraying his weakness. In his deeper and clearer moods he felt a strange and profound presentiment of immortality, and surmised that this life was neither the first nor the last of us. But living as he did mostly for this material world and its prizes, he could not hold his mind steadily to the sublime height of belief in the eternal life of the soul. And so all sorts of doubts came in and were recklessly entertained. Had his spirituality equalled his sensibility and intelligence, and had he aimed at personal perfection as zealously as he aimed at professional excellence, his faith in immortality would have been as unshakable as was his faith in God. Also could he have filled his soul with the spirit of forgiveness and charity instead of harboring tenacious instincts of hate and disgust, he would have been a serene and benignant man. His complaining irritability would have vanished in a devout contentment; for he would have seen a plan of exact compensations everywhere threading the maze of human life.

But then he would not have been Edwin Forrest. Inconsistent extremes, unregulated impulsiveness, unsubdued passion, some moral incongruity of character and conduct, of intuition and thought, belonged to his type of being. It is only required that those who assume to judge him shall be just, and not be misled by any superficial or partial appearance of good or evil to give an unfair verdict. His defects were twofold, and he had to pay the full penalty for them. First, no man can lead a really happy and noble life, in the high and true sense of the words, who is infested with feelings of hate and loathing towards persons who have injured him or shown themselves detestable. He must refuse to entertain such emotions, and with a magnanimous and loving heart contemplate the fairer side of society. For almost all our experience, whether we know it or not, is strained through and tested and measured by our emotional estimates of our fellow-men. It is chiefly in them, or in ourselves as affected by our thoughts of them, that God reveals himself to us or hides himself from us. Second, Forrest not only dwelt too much on mean or hostile persons and on real or fancied wrongs, but he did not live chiefly for the only ends which are worthy to be the supreme aim of man. The genuine ends of a man in this world are to glorify God, to serve humanity, and to perfect himself. And these three are inseparably conjoined, a triune unity. The man who faithfully lives for these religious ends will surely attain peace of mind and unwavering faith in a Providence which orders everything and cannot err. The highest conscious ends of Forrest were not religious, but were to glorify his art, to perfect his strength and skill, and to win the ordinary prizes of society,—wealth, fame, and pleasure. Elements of the superior aims indeed entered largely into his spirit and conduct, but were not his proposed and consecrating aim. This, as now frankly set forth, was his failure, and the lesson it has for other men.

But, on the other hand, he had his praiseworthy success. If he was inferior to the best men, he was greatly superior to most men. For he was no hypocrite, parasite, profligate, squanderer of his own resources, or usurper of the rights of others. After every abatement it will be said of him, by all who knew the man through and through, that he was great and original in personality, honest in every fibre, truthful and upright according to the standard of his own conscience, tender and sweet and generous in the inmost impulses of his soul. On the other hand, it must be admitted that he was often the obstinate victim of injurious and unworthy prejudices, and abundantly capable of a profanity that was vulgar and of animosities that were ferocious. This is written in the very spirit which he himself inculcated on his biographer, to whom he addressed these words with his own hand in 1870: “Having revealed myself and my history to you without disguise or affectation, I say, Tell the blunt truth in every particular you touch, no matter where it hits or what effect it may have. To make it easier for you, I could well wish that my whole life, moral and mental, professional and social, could have been photographed for your use in this biographical undertaking. And then, ‘though all occasions should inform against me,’ though I might have too much cause to sigh over my many weaknesses and follies, no single act of mine, I am sure, should ever make me blush with shame. I always admired the spirit of Cromwell, who said sternly, when an artist in taking his portrait would have omitted the disfiguring wart on his face, ‘Paint me as I am!’”

Forrest was one of those elemental men who want always to live in direct contact with great realities, and cannot endure to accept petty substitutes for them, or pale phantoms of them at several removes. He craved to taste the substantial goods of the earth in their own freshness, and refused to be put off with mere social symbols of them. He loved the grass, the wind, the sun, the rain, the sky, the mountains, the thunder, the democracy. He loved his country earnestly, truth sincerely, his art profoundly, men and women passionately and made them love him passionately,—the last too often and too much. For these reasons he is an interesting and contagious character, and, as his figure is destined to loom in history, it is important that his best traits be appreciated at their full worth.

It is but justice, as an offset to his occasional fits of the blues and to the lugubrious sentiments he then expressed, some of which were quoted a page or two back, to affirm the truth that if he suffered more than most people he likewise enjoyed much more. Prevailingly he loved the world, and set a high value on life and took uncommon pains to secure longevity. As a general thing his spirit of enjoyment was sharp and strong. One illustration of this was the pronounced activity of the element of humor in him. This humor was sometimes grim, almost sardonic, and bordering on irony and satire, but often breathed itself out in a sunny playfulness. This lubricated the joints and sockets of the soul, so to speak, and made the mechanism of experience move smoothly when otherwise it would have gritted harshly with great frictional waste in unhappy resistances. It is difficult to give in words due illustration of this quality, of its genial manifestations in his manner, and of its happy influence on his inner life. But all his intimate friends know that the trait was prominent in him and of great importance. When on board the steamer bound for California, sick and wretched, he sent for the captain, and with great earnestness demanded, “For how much will you sell this ship and cargo?” After giving a rough estimate of the value, the captain asked, “But why do you wish to know this?” Forrest answered, “I want to scuttle her and end this detestable business by sinking the whole concern to the bottom of the sea!” A soft-spoken clergyman, who occupied the next state-room, overheard him giving energetic expression to his discontent, and called on him to expostulate on the duty of forbearance and patience, saying, “Our Saviour, you know, was always patient.” “Yes,” retorted the actor, grimly, “but our Saviour went to sea only once, and then he disliked it so much that he got out and walked. Unfortunately, we cannot do that.”

At another time a Calvinistic divine had been trying to convince him of the punitive character of death, arguing that death was not the original destiny of man, but a penalty imposed for sin. “What,” said Forrest, “do you mean to say that if it had not been for that unlucky apple we should have seen old Adam hobbling around here still?”

Even to the end of his life he had the heart of a boy, and when with trusted friends it was ever and anon breaking forth in a playfulness and a jocosity which would have astonished those who deemed him so stern and lugubrious a recluse. One day he went into a druggist’s shop where he was familiar, for some little article. The druggist chanced to be alone and stooping very low behind his counter pouring something from a jug. Forrest slipped up and leaning over him thundered in his ear with full pomp of declamation, “An ounce of civet, good apothecary!” The poor trader revealed his comic fright by a bound from the floor which would not have disgraced a gymnast.

On arriving at the places where he was to act he was often annoyed by strangers who pressed about him with pestering importunity merely from a vulgar curiosity. On these occasions he would sometimes, as he reached the hotel and saw the crowd, leap out of the carriage, say with a low bow to his agent, “Please keep your seat, Mr. Forrest, and I will inquire about a room,” and then vanish, laughing in his sleeve, and leaving the embarrassed McArdle to sustain the situation as best he might.

His just and complacent pride in his work, too, kept him from being chronically any such disappointed and grouty complainer as he might sometimes appear. It is a sublime joy for a man of genius, a great artist, to feel, as the reward of heroic labor engrafted on great endowment, that his rank is at the top of the world; that in some particulars he is superior to all the twelve hundred millions of men that are alive. There were passages in the acting of Forrest, besides the terrific burst of passion in the curse of Lear, which he might well believe no other man on earth could equal.

The knowledge and culture of Forrest were in no sense limited to the range of his profession. He was uncommonly well educated, not only by a wide acquaintance with books, but also by a remarkably varied observation and experience of the world. Whenever he spoke or wrote, some proof appeared of his reading and reflection. Speaking of Humboldt, he said, “Humboldt was a man open to truth without a prejudice. He was to the tangible and physical world what Shakspeare was to the mind and heart of man.” Characterizing a religious discourse which much pleased him, he said, “Its logic is incontrovertible, its philosophy unexceptionable, and its humanity most admirable,—quite different from those homilies which people earth with demons, heaven with slaves, and hell with men.” On one occasion, alluding to the facts that Shakspeare when over forty attended the funeral of his mother, and that his boy Hamnet died at the age of twelve, he regretted that the peerless poet had not written out what he must then have felt, and given it to the world. His genius under such an inspiration might have produced something which would have made thenceforth to the end of time all parents who read it treat their children more tenderly, all children love and honor their parents more religiously. But, he added, it seemed contrary to the genius of Shakspeare to utilize his own experience for any didactic purpose. At another time he said, “Shakspeare is the most eloquent preacher that ever taught humanity to man. The sermons he uttered will be repeated again and again with renewed and unceasing interest not only in his own immortal pages, but from the inspired lips of great tragedians through all the coming ages of the world.”

A touching thing in Forrest in his last years was the unpurposed organic revelation in his voice of what he had suffered in the battle of life. What he had experienced of injustice and harshness, of selfishness and treachery, of beautiful things relentlessly snatched away by time and death, had left a permanent memorial in the unstudied tones and cadences of his speech. As he narrated or quoted or read, his utterance was varied in close keeping with what was to be expressed. But the moment he fell back on himself, and gave spontaneous utterance from within, there was a perpetual recurrence of a minor cadence, a half-veiled sigh, a strangely plaintive tone, sweet and mournful as the wail of a dying wind in a hemlock grove.

A trait of Forrest, to which all his friends will testify, was the perfect freedom of his usual manner in private life from all theatricality or affectation. His bearing was natural and honest, varying truthfully with his impulses. With an actor so powerfully marked as he this is not common. Most great actors carry from their professional into their daily life some fixed strut of attitude or chronic stilt of elocution or pompous trick of quotation. It was not so with Forrest, and his detachment from all such habits, his straight-on simplicity, were an honor to him and a charm to those who could appreciate the suppression of the shop in the manly assertion of dignity and rectitude. He had no swagger, though he had a swing which belonged to his heavy equilibrium. His speech attracted attention only from its uncommon ease and finish, not from any ostentation. The actor, it has been justly said, is so far contemptible who keeps his mock grandeur on when his buskins are off, and orders a coffee-boy with the air of a Roman general commanding an army. He seems ever to say by his manner, It is easier to be a hero than to act one. Charles Lamb relates that a friend one day said to Elliston, “I like Wrench because he is the same natural easy creature on the stage that he is off.” Elliston replied, with charming unconsciousness, “My case exactly. I am the same person off the stage that I am on.” The inference instead of being identical was opposite. The one was never acting, the other always. Mrs. Siddons, it is said, used to stab the potatoes, and call for a teaspoon in a tone that curdled the blood of the waiter. Once when she was buying a piece of calico at a shop in Bath, she interrupted the voluble trader by inquiring, Will it wash? with an accent that made him start back from the counter. John Philip Kemble, dissatisfied with Sheridan’s management and resolved to free himself from all engagements with him, rose in the greenroom like a slow pillar of state, and said to that astonished individual, “I am an eagle whose wings have long been bound down by frosts and snows; but now I shake my pinions and cleave into the general air unto which I am born.” Sheridan looked into the heart of the eagle, and with a few wheedling words smoothed his ruffled plumage and made him coo like a dove in response to new proposals. Greatness of soul is necessary for a great actor, quick detachableness, and facility of transitions, with full understanding, sensibility, and fire; but cold counterfeits of these, empty forms of them swollen out with mechanic pomp, are as odious as they are frequent. Some are great only when inspired and set off by grand adjuncts; others are great by the native build of their being. Forrest was of this latter class. He knew how to act in the theatre, and to be simple and sincere in the parlor.

But, when all is said, the greatest quality and charm of Forrest, the deepest hiding of his magnetism, was his softness and truth of heart, the quickness, strength, and beauty of his affection. Bitter experience had taught him, before he was an old man, not to wear his heart on his sleeve for the heartless to peck at it. But how shallow the observation which, not seeing his heart on his sleeve, incontinently concluded that he had none! The reverential gratitude with which he delighted to dwell on the memory of his mother, the yearning fondness with which he was wont to recall the names of his early benefactors and dwell on the thought of the few living friends who had been ever kind and true to him, amply demonstrated the strong grasp of his affection. “My mother,” he one day said to him who now copies his words, “was weeping on a certain occasion in my early childhood when she was hard pressed by poverty and care. My father, in his grave, almost awful way, said to her, ‘Do not weep, Rebecca. It will do no good. I know it is very dark here. But it is all right. Above the clouds the sun is still shining.’ I remember it made a great impression on my young mind; and many a time in afterlife it came up and was a comfort to me. Ah, what, what would I not give if I could really believe that when that dear good soul left the earth my father met her ‘on a happier shore,’ and said, ‘Rebecca, you will weep no more now. Did I not tell you it was all right?’” After the death of Forrest, nigh a quarter of a century after it was written, was found among his papers a faded and tear-stained letter, enclosing two withered leaves, which read thus:

“These leaves were taken from your mother’s grave, on Sunday, August 5th, 1849, and are presented as a humble but sacred memorial by your friend,

There is no surer proof of plentifulness of love within than is shown by its finding vent in endearments lavished on lower creatures and on inanimate things,—flowers, books, pictures, birds, dogs, horses. All these were copiously loved by Forrest. All his life he had some dog for a friend, and for the last twenty years he kept two or more. In the summer of 1870 a little turkey in his garden, only a week old, by some accident got its leg broken. He saw it, and commiserately picked up the poor thing, carefully set its leg, laid it in a basket of wool, hung it in a tree in the sunshine, and tenderly nursed and fed it till it was whole. This and the succeeding incidents occurred under the observation of his biographer, who was then paying him a visit.

He used to go into his stable and pat and fondle his horses and talk with them, looking in their eyes and smoothing their necks, as if they had full intelligence and sympathy with him. “Why, Brownie, poor Brownie, handsome Brownie, are you not happy to come out to-day?” he said, as we rode along the Wissahickon, in a tone so tender and sad that it moistened the eyes of his human hearer. It was his custom to go up the river-side to a secluded place, and there get out and feed the horse with apples. One day he had forgotten his supply, and, as he dismounted and walked along in front of Brownie, he was touched to find the intelligent creature following him, smelling at his pockets and nudging him for her apples.

In one aspect it was beautiful, in another it was mournful, to see him going about his house, lonely, lonely, solacing himself for what was absent with humble substitutes. He had a mocking-bird wonderfully gifted and a great favorite with him and his sister. It bore the nickname of Bob. In moulting it fell sick, lost both voice and sight, and seemed to be dying. The great soft-hearted tragedian, thought by many to be so gruff and savage, was overheard, as he stood before the cage, talking to the sick bird, “Ah, poor Bob, poor Bob! Your myriad-voiced throat has filled my house with wondrous melodies these years past. Why must this cruel affliction come to you? You are a sinless creature. You cannot do any harm. It perplexes my philosophy to know why you should have to suffer in this way. Ah, little Bob, where now are all your sweet mockeries? Blind? Dumb? It cuts me to the very soul to think of it. Ah, well, well!” And he tottered slowly away, musing, quite as his Lear used to do on the stage when unkindness had broken the old royal heart.

Another characteristic incident is worth relating. He had a chamber at the Metropolitan Hotel fronting on Broadway. Oakes and the present writer were in a rear room. He sent for us to come to him and see the funeral-procession of Farragut pass. He sank on his knees at the open window as the sacred corse went by, and we saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. The bands played a dirge, and the soldiers and marines marched on, visible masses of music in blue and gold, as the sailors proudly carried their dead admiral through the central artery of the nation, and every heart seemed vibrating with reverence and grief. “The grandest thing about this,” said Forrest, “is that he was a good man, worthy of all the honor he receives. He whose modesty kept his bosom from ever swelling with complacency while he was alive may now well exult in death, as the sailors, unwilling to confide their commander to any catafalque, lovingly bear him on their shoulders to his grave.”

The love which Forrest had for children was one of the deepest traits of his disposition. This tenderness was the same all through his career, except that it seemed to grow more profound and pensive in his age. Two anecdotes selected from among many will set this quality in an interesting light. When he was in the fullest strength of his manhood and was acting in Boston at the old National Theatre, there was at his hotel a very sick child whose mother was quite worn out with nursing it. Forrest begged permission to take care of the little sufferer through the succeeding night, that the mother might sleep. The mother, fearing that the terrible Metamora would prove rather a repulsive nurse for her darling, hesitated, but at length gave consent. At the close of the play he hurried back with so much haste that half the paint was left on one of his cheeks. Through the whole night, hour after hour, he paced up and down the room, tenderly soothing the fevered babe, which lay on his great chest with nothing but a silk shirt between its face and his skin. The mother slept, and so did the child. And when the doctor came in the morning, he said that the care of Forrest and the vitality the infant drew from his body during the long hours had saved its life.

The other anecdote, though less dramatic, is of still deeper significance as a revelation of his soul. During the last ten or twelve years of his life, when he was fulfilling his engagements in the different cities, he used so to time and direct his walks that he might be near some great public school at the hour when the children were dismissed. There he would stand—the grim-looking, lonely old man, whose surface might be hard, but whose heart was very soft—and gaze with a thoughtful and loving regard on the throng of boys and girls as they rushed out bubbling over with delight, variously sorting and grouping themselves on their way home. This was a great enjoyment to him, though not unmixed with an attractive pain. It soothed his childless soul with ideal parentage, gave him a bright glad life in reflected sympathy with the dancing shouters he saw, and stirred in his imagination a thousand dreams, now of the irrevocable past, now of the mysterious future.

Resuming the narrative with the opening of June, 1872, Forrest is lying in his bed in a woeful state, brought on him by a nostrum called “Jenkins’s cure for gout.” A doctor Jenkins of New Orleans told him if he would take it, it would produce an excruciating attack of the disease, but would then eradicate it from the system and effect a permanent cure. He took it. He experienced the excruciating attack. The permanent cure did not follow. As soon as Oakes learned of his situation, body racked with torture, limbs palsied, mind at times unhinged and wandering, he started for the scene. His own words will best describe their meeting. “When I entered his chamber he was in a doze, and I stood at his bedside until he awoke. Opening his eyes, he gazed steadily into my face for about a minute. He knew me then, and said, in the most touching manner, ‘My friend, I am always glad to see you, but never in my life so much so as now.’ Again looking steadily at me for about a minute, he said, ‘Oakes, put my hand in yours: it is paralyzed but true.’ I took his hand tenderly from the bed and placed it in mine. He could not move the fingers, but I felt his noble heart throb through them. At once I began organizing my hospital. I had him washed, his flannel and the bed-linen changed, the doors and windows flung wide open, and gave him all he could take of the best of nourishment,—strawberries, fresh buttermilk, and beef tea strong enough to draw four hundred pounds the whole length of the house. Already he is greatly improved. I keep him perfectly quiet, allowing no one on any excuse whatever to see him.” Under this style of doctoring and nursing, all impregnated with the magnetism of friendship, it was natural that in three weeks he should be comfortably about his house, as he was.

One morning in the midst of his illness, but when he had passed a night free from pain, and his mind was in a most serene state yet marked by great exaltation of thought and language, he began relating to Oakes, in the most eloquent manner, his recollections of old Joseph Jefferson, the great comedian. He told how when a boy he had visited that beautiful and gifted old man; what poverty and what purity and high morality were in his household; how he had educated his children; and how at last he had died among strangers, heart-broken by ingratitude. He told how he had seen him act Dogberry in a way that out-topped all comparison; how at a later time he had again seen him play the part of the Fool in Lear so as to set up an idol in the memory of the beholders, for he insinuated into the words such wonderful contrasts of the greatness and misery and mystery of life with the seeming ignorant and innocent simplicity of the comments on them, that comedy became wiser and stronger than tragedy.

His listener afterwards said, “We two were alone. Never had I seen him so deeply and so loftily stirred in his very soul as he was then about Jefferson. His eulogy had more moral dignity and intense religious feeling than any sermon I ever heard from the pulpit. It was as grand and fine as anything said by Cicero. This was especially true of his closing words. When he seemed to have emptied his heart in admiring praises on the old player, he ended thus, querying with himself as if soliloquizing: ‘Is it possible that all of such a man can go into the ground and rot, and nothing of him at all be left forever? If he is not immortal, he ought to be. It must be that he is, though our philosophy cannot find it out.’”

It is a curious proof of how his moods shaped and colored his beliefs to read in connection with the above the following extract from a letter he wrote in 1866. “There is great consolation in the sincere belief of the immortality of the soul. If I could honestly and reasonably entertain such a faith, that the love and friendship of to-day will extend through all time with renewed devotion, death would have no sting and the grave no victory. I quite envied the closing hours of Senator Foote the other day. He was so serenely confident of seeing all his friends again, that by the perishing light of his fervid brain he seemed for a moment to realize the illusion of his earth-taught faith.”

It was now September. The semi-paralyzed condition of his limbs forbade every thought of returning to the stage that season; though, with a self-flattery singular in one of so experienced and clear a head, he fondly hoped to recover in time, and to act for years yet. His interest in everything connected with his profession knew no abatement, and he always took the most cheerful view of the future of the drama. He did not yield to that common fallacy which glorifies the past at the expense of the present and holds that everything glorious is always in decline and sure ere long to perish. Sheridan said, while surrounded by Johnson, Burke, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Pitt, and Fox, “The days of little men have arrived.” The trouble is that we see the foibles and feel the faults of our contemporaries, but not those of our predecessors who sit, afar and still, aggrandized into Olympians in historic memory. Mrs. Siddons often saw before her, sitting together in the orchestra, all in tears, Burke, Reynolds, Fox, Gibbon, Windham, and Sheridan. Yet in her day as now the constant talk was of the failing glory of the theatre. Also in the time of Talma, in 1807, Cailhava presented a memoir to the Institute of France, “Sur les Causes de la Décadence du Théâtre.” The fact is, the theatres of the world were never so numerous, so splendid, so largely attended, as now; the playing as a whole was never so good, the morality of the pieces never so high, and the behavior of the audiences never so orderly and refined. In spite of everything that can be said on the other side, this is the truth. The former advantage of the drama was simply that it stood out in more solitary and conspicuous relief, occupied a larger relative space, and made therefore a greater and more talked-of sensation. Its rule is now divided with a swarm of other claimants. Still, intrinsically its worth and rank must increase in the future, and not diminish. Forrest always clearly held to this faith, and was much cheered by it. His conviction that the drama was charged with a sacred and indestructible mission, and his enthusiastic love for the personal practice of its art,—these were thoughts and feelings

Accordingly, he would withdraw from the worship of his life, if withdraw he must, only piecemeal and as compelled. His voice was unimpaired, and he had for years been solicited to give readings. And so he resolved, since he could not play Hamlet and Othello on the stage, he would read them in the lecture-room.

Therefore he read these two plays in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Brooklyn, New York, and Boston. Although the rich mellow fulness, ease, and force of his elocution were highly enjoyable, and there were many beauties of characterization in his readings, his physique was so deeply shattered, and his vital forces so depressed, that the vivacity, the magnetism, the spirited variety of power necessary to draw and to hold a miscellaneous crowd were wanting. The experiment was comparatively a failure. The large halls were so thinly seated that, though the marks of approval were strong, the result was not inspiring. He felt somewhat disheartened, much wearied, and sighed for a good long period of rest in his own quiet home. And so on Saturday afternoon, December 7, 1872, in Tremont Temple, Boston, he read Othello, and made unconsciously his last bow on earth to a public assembly, with the apt words of the unhappy Moor, whose character much resembled his own:

Oakes went with him to the train, saw him comfortably installed in the car, and bade him an affectionate good-bye. “Another parting, my friend!” said Forrest: “the last one must come some time. I shall probably be the first to die.” Arriving at the hotel in New York, he ordered a room and a fire, and went to bed, “and lay there thinking,” as he said, “what a pleasant time he was indebted to his friend for in Boston.” He reached home safely on the 9th. Two days he passed in rest, lounging about his library, reading a little, and attending only to a few necessary matters of business. “The time glided away like an ecstatic dream, without any let or hindrance,” he wrote on the 11th to Oakes,—the last letter he ever penned,—closing with the words, “God bless you ever, my dear and much valued friend.”

The earthly finale was at hand. Twenty years before this, in 1852, he wrote to one of his early friends:

“I thank you for your kindness in drinking my health in company with my sisters to-day, the anniversary of my birth. The weather here is gloomy and wears an aspect in accordance with the color of my fate. There is a destiny in this strange world which often decrees an undeserved doom. The ways of Providence are truly mysterious. From boyhood to the present time I have endeavored to walk the paths of honor and honesty with a kindly and benevolent spirit towards all men. And I am not unwilling that my whole course of life should be scrutinized with justice and impartiality. When it shall be so all weighed together I have no fear of the result. And yet I have been fearfully wronged, maligned, and persecuted. I do not, however, lose my faith and trust in that God who will one day hold all men to a strict and sure account. Kind regards to all, and believe me,

On the eighth recurrence of the same anniversary after the date of the above sombre epistle—that is, in 1860—he wrote these words: “Friendship is as much prostituted as love. My heart is sick, and I grow aweary of life.” And once more, on the 9th of March, 1871, he set down his feeling in the melancholy sentence, “This is my birthday, another funeral procession in my sad life, and the end not far off.” These expressions reveal the gloomier side of a soul which had its sunny side as well, and the more painful aspect of a life which was also abundantly blessed with wealth, triumphs, and pleasures. But be the outward lot of any man what it may, unless he has communion with God, a love for his fellows that swallows up every hatred, and a firm faith in immortality, the burden of the song of his unsatisfied soul will ever be, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

But sooner or later there is an hour for every earthly vanity to cease. Nothing mortal can escape or be denied the universal fate and boon of death. Its meaning is the same for all, however diverse its disguises or varied its forms. A slave and prisoner, starved and festered in his chains, groaned, as the sweet and strange release came, “How welcome is this deliverance! Farewell, painful world and cruel men!” A Sultan, stricken and sinking on his throne, cried, “O God, I am passing away in the hand of the wind!” A fool, in his painted costume, with his grinning bauble in his hand, said, as he too vanished into the hospitable Unknown, “Alackaday, poor Tom is a dying, and nobody cares. O me! was there ever such a pitiful to-do?” And a Pope, the crucifix lifted before his eyes and the tiara trembling from his brow, breathed his life out in the words, “Now I surrender my soul to Him who gave it!”

The death of a player is particularly suggestive and impressive from the sharp contrast of its perfect reality and sincerity with all the fictitious assumptions and scenery of his professional life. The last drop-scene is the lowering of the eyelid on that emptied ocular stage which in its time has held so many acts and actors. The deaths of many players have been marked by mysterious coincidences. Powell, starting from the bed on which he lay ill, cried, “Is this a dagger which I see before me? O God!”—and instantly expired. Peterson, playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, said,—

and fell into the arms of the Friar to whom he was speaking; and these were his last words. Cummings had just spoken the words of Dumont in Jane Shore—

when he suddenly gasped, and was dead. Palmer, while enacting the part of the Stranger, having uttered the sentence in his rôle, “There is another and a better world,” dropped lifeless on the stage. In such instances Fate interpolates in the stereotyped performance a dread impromptu which must make us all feel what mysteries we are and by what mysteries enshrouded.

The morning of the 12th came, and the death of Edwin Forrest was at hand. In the early light, solitary in the privacy of his chamber, he who had no blood relative on earth, the last of his race, was summoned to give up his soul and take the unreturning road into the voiceless mystery. He who in the mimic scene had so often acted death was now to perform it in reality. Now he who in all his theatrical impersonations had been so democratic, was to be, in his closing and unwitnessed human impersonation, supremely democratic, both in the substance and in the manner of his performing. For this severing of the spirit from the flesh, this shrouded and mystic farewell of the soul to the world, is a part cast inevitably for every member of the family of man, and enacted under conditions essentially identical by all, from the emperor to the pauper. Perform or omit whatever else he may, every one must go through with this. Furthermore, in the enactment of it all artificial dialects of expression, all caste peculiarities of behavior, fall away; the profoundest vernacular language of universal nature alone comes to the surface, and the pallor of the face, the tremor of the limbs, the glazing of the eye, the gasp, the rattle, the long sigh, and the unbreakable silence,—are the same for all. Death knows neither politeness nor impoliteness, only truth. Now the hour was at hand whose coming and method had been foresignalled years ago, when, at Washington, an apoplectic clot hung the warning of its black flag in his brain. No visible spectators gathered to the sight, whatever invisible ones may have come. No lights were kindled, no music played, no bell rang, no curtain rose, no prompter spoke. But the august theatre of nature, crowded with the circulating ranks of existence, stood open for the performance of the most critical and solemn portion of a mortal destiny. And suddenly the startling command came. With a shudder of all the terrified instincts of the organism he sprang to the action. There was a sanguinary rush through the proscenium of the senses. The cerebral stage deluged in blood, the will instantly surrendered its private functions, all fleshly consciousness vanished, and that automatic procedure of nature, which, when not meddled with by individual volition, is infallible, took up the task. Then, step by step, point for point, phase on phase, he went through the enactment of his own death, in the minutest particulars from beginning to end, with a precision that was absolutely perfect, and a completeness that could never admit of a repetition. It was the greatest part, filled with the most boundless meaning, of all that he had ever sustained; and no critic could detect the slightest flaw in its representation.

The appalling performance was done, the actor disrobed, transformed, and vanished, when the servants, concerned at his delay to appear, and alarmed at obtaining no answer to their knocking, entered the chamber. The body, dressed excepting as to the outer coat, lay facing upwards on the bed, with the hands grasping a pair of light dumb-bells, and a livid streak across the right temple. A near friend and a physician were immediately called. But it was vain. The fatal acting was finished, and the player gone beyond recall.

Before noon Oakes received the shock of this portentous telegram from Dougherty: “Forrest died this morning; nothing will be done until you arrive.” He started at once, and reached Philadelphia in the bitter cold of the next morning at four o’clock. Describing the scene, at a later period, he writes, “I went directly into his bedchamber. There he lay, white and pulseless as a man of marble. For a few minutes it seemed to me that my body was as cold as his and my heart as still. The little while I stood at his side, speechless, almost lifeless, seemed an age. No language can express the agony of that hour, and even now I cannot bear to turn my mind back to it.”

Arrangements were made for a simple and unostentatious funeral; a modest card of invitation being sent to only about sixty of his nearest friends or associates in private and professional life. But it was found necessary to forego the design of a reserved and quiet burial on account of the multitudes who felt so deep an interest in the occasion, and expressed so strong a desire to be present at the last services that they could not be refused admission. When the hour arrived, on that dark and rainy December day, the heavens muffled in black and weeping as if they felt with the human gloom below, the streets were blocked with the crowd, all anxious to see once more, ere it was borne forever from sight, the memorable form and face. The doors were thrown open to them, and it was estimated that nearly two thousand people in steady stream flowed in and out, each one in turn taking his final gaze. The house was draped in mourning and profusely filled with flowers. In a casket covered with a black cloth, silver mounted, and with six silver handles, clothed in a black dress suit, reposed the dead actor. Every trace of passion and of pain was gone from the firm and fair countenance, looking startlingly like life, whose placid repose nothing could ever disturb again. All over the body and the casket and around it were heaped floral tributes in every form, sent from far and near,—crosses, wreaths, crowns, and careless clusters. From four actresses in four different cities came a cross of red and white roses, a basket of evergreens, a wreath of japonicas, and a crown of white camelias. Delegations from various dramatic associations were present. A large deputation of the Lotus Club came from New York with the mayor of that city at their head. All classes were there, from the most distinguished to the most humble. Many of the old steadfast friends of other days passed the coffin, and looked their last on its occupant, with dripping eyes. One, a life-long professional coadjutor, stooped and kissed the clay-cold brow. Several poor men and women who had been blessed by his silent charities touched every heart by the deep grief they showed. And the household servants wept aloud at parting from the old master who had made himself earnestly loved by them.

The only inscription on the coffin-lid was the words,