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frankly, do you think that with time and. We went first to see a comedy greatly

study I could compose music such as
singers equal to myself would sing to?
"You mean as a professional com-
poser?"

"Well, yes."

"And to the abandonment of your vo- not how many tableaux. I found no fault cation as a singer?"

"Yes."

"My dear child, I should be your worst enemy if I encouraged such a notion; cling to the career in which you can be greatest; gain but health, and I wager my reputation on your glorious success on the stage. What can you be as a composer? You will set pretty music to pretty words, and will be sung in drawing-rooms with the fame a little more or less that generally attends the compositions of female amateurs. Aim at something higher, as I know you would do, and you will not succeed. Is there any instance in modern times, perhaps in any times, of a female composer who attains even to the eminence of a thirdrate opera writer? Composition in letters may be of no sex. In that Madame Dudevant and your friend Madame de Grantmesnil can beat most men; but the genius of musical composition is homme, and accept it as a compliment when I say that you are essentially femme"

in vogue, and the author theroughly understands the French stage of our day. The acting was excellent in its way. The next night we went to the Odeon, a romantic melodrama in six acts, and I know with the acting there. I do not give you the rest of our programme. We visited all the principal theatres, reserving the opera and Madame S- for the last. Before I speak of the opera, let me say a word or two on the plays.

There is no country in which the theatre has so great a hold on the public as in France; no country in which the successful dramatist has so high a fame; no country perhaps in which the state of the stage so faithfully represents the moral and intellectual condition of the people. I say this not, of course, from my experience of countries which I have not visited, but from all I hear of the stage in Germany and in England.

The impression left on my mind by the performances I witnessed is, that the French people are becoming dwarfed. The comedies that please them are but pleasant caricatures of petty sections in a corrupt society. They contain no large types of human nature; their witticisms convey no luminous flashes of truth; He left me, of course, mortified and their sentiment is not pure and noble — humbled; but I feel he is right as re-it is a sickly and false perversion of the gards myself, though whether in his de- impure and ignoble into travesties of the preciation of our whole sex I cannot say. pure and noble. But as this hope has left me, I have become more disquieted, still more restless. Counsel me, Eulalie; counsel, and, if possible, comfort me.

ISAURA.

From the Same to the Same. No letter from you yet, and I have left you in peace for ten days. How do you think I have spent them? The Mastro called on us with M. Savarin, to insist on our accompanying them on a round of the theatres. I had not been to one since my arrival. I divined that the kindhearted composer had a motive in this invitation. He thought that in witnessing the applauses bestowed on actors, and sharing in the fascination in which theatrical illusion holds an audience, my old passion for the stage, and with it the longing for an artiste's fame, would re

vive.

Their melodramas cannot be classed as literature - all that really remains of the old French genius is its vaudeville.

Great dramatists create great parts. One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the young generation.

High art has taken refuge in the opera; but that is not French opera. I do not complain so much that French taste is less refined. I complain that French intellect is lowered. The descent from Polyeucte to Ruy Blas is great, not so much in the poetry of form as in the elevation of thought; but the descent from Ruy Blas to the best drama now produced is out of poetry altogether, and into those flats of prose which give not even the glimpse of a mountain-top.

But now to the opera. S - in Norma! The house was crowded, and its enthusiasm as loud as it was genuine. In my heart I wished that his expecta- You tell me that S- never rivalled tions might be realized. Well for me if Pasta, but certainly her Norma is a great I could once more concentre all my as-performance. Her voice has lost less of pirations on a prize within my reach! its freshness than I had been told, and

what is lost of it her practised management conceals or carries off.

The Mastro was quite right—I could never vie with her in her own line; but conceited and vain as I may seem even to you in saying so, I feel in my own line that I could command as large an applause-of course taking into account my brief-lived advantage of youth. Her acting, apart from her voice, does not please me. It seems to me to want intelligence of the subtler feelings, the under-current of emotion, which constitutes the chief beauty of the situation and the character. Am I jealous when I say this? Read on and judge.

On our return that night, when I had seen the Venosta to bed, I went into my own room, opened the window, and looked out. A lovely night, mild as in spring at Florence - the moon at her full, and the stars looking so calm and so high beyond our reach of their tranquillity. The evergreens in the gardens of the villas around me silvered over, and the summer boughs, not yet clothed with leaves, were scarcely visible amid the changeless smile of the laurels. At the distance lay Paris only to be known by its innumerable lights. And then I said to myself·

"No, I cannot be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage robes and painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by rote and practised before the looking-glass till every gesture has its drill."

alas! not inspiration but enthusiasm from the genius that had hallowed the place, and dreaming I might originate music, I nursed my own aspirations and murmured my own airs. And though so close to that world of Paris to which all artists must appeal for judgment or audience, the spot was so undisturbed, so sequestered. But of late that path has lost its solitude, and therefore its charm.

Six days ago the first person I encountered in my walk was a man whom I did not then heed. He seemed in thought, or rather in reverie, like myself; we passed each other twice or thrice, and I did not notice whether he was young or old, tall or short; but he came the next day, and a third day, and then I saw that he was young, and, in so regarding him, his eyes became fixed on mine. The fourth day he did not come, but two other men came, and the look of one was inquisitive and offensive. They sat themselves down on a bench in the walk, and though I did not seem to notice them, I hastened home; and the next day, in talking with our kind Madame Savarin, and alluding to these quiet walks of mine, she hinted, with the delicacy which is her characteristic, that the customs of Paris did not allow Demoiselles comme il faut to walk alone even in the most sequestered paths of the Bois.

I begin now to comprehend your disdain of customs which impose chains so idly galling on the liberty of our sex.

We dined with the Savarins last evening: what a joyous nature he has! Not Then I gazed on those stars which pro-reading Latin, I only know Horace by voke our questionings, and return no answer, till my heart grew full, so full, and I bowed my head and wept like a child.

From the Same to the Same. And still no letter from you! I see in the journals that you have left Nice. Is it that you are too absorbed in your work to have leisure to write to me? I know you are not ill; for if you were, all Paris would know of it. All Europe has an interest in your health. Positively I will write to you no more till a word from yourself bids me do so.

I fear I must give up my solitary walks in the Bois de Boulogne: they were very dear to me, partly because the quiet path to which I confined myself was that to which you directed me as the one you habitually selected when at Paris, and in which you had brooded over and revolved the loveliest of your romances; and partly because it was there that, catching,

translations, which I am told are bad; but Savarin seems to me a sort of half Horace. Horace on his town-bred side, so playfully well-bred, so good-humoured in his philosophy, so affectionate to friends, and so biting to foes. But certainly Savarin could not have lived in a country farm upon endives and mallows. He is town-bred and Parisian, jusqu'au bout des ongles. How he admires you, and how I love him for it! Only in one thing he disappoints me there. It is your style that he chiefly praises: certainly that style is matchless; but style is only the clothing of thought, and to praise your style seems to me almost as invidious as the compliment to some perfect beauty, not on her form and face, but on her taste in dress.

We met at dinner an American and his wife - a Colonel and Mrs. Morley: she is delicately handsome, as the American women I have seen generally are, and

with that frank vivacity of manner which distinguishes them from English women. She seemed to take a fancy to me, and we soon grew very good friends.

She is the first advocate I have met, except yourself, of that doctrine upon the Rights of Women of which one reads more in the journals than one hears discussed in salons.

presses me, into the being of some one
who is what I would wish to be were I
man! I would not ask him to achieve
fame. Enough if I felt that he was
worthy of it, and happier methinks to
console him when he failed than to tri-
umph with him when he won.
Tell me,
have you felt this? When you loved did
you stoop as to a slave, or did you bow
down as to a master?

Cicogna.

Chère enfant, All your four letters have reached me the same day. In one of my sudden whims I set off with a few friends on a rapid tour along the Riviera to Genoa, thence to Turin on to Milan. Not knowing where we should rest even for a day, my letters were not forwarded.

Naturally enough I felt great interest in that subject, more especially since my rambles in the Bois were forbidden; and From Madame de Grantmesnil to Isaura as long as she declaimed on the hard fate | of the women who, feeling within them powers that struggle for air and light beyond the close precinct of household duties, find themselves restricted from fair rivalry with men in such fields of knowledge and toil and glory, as men since the world began have appropriated to themselves, I need not say that I went with her cordially you can guess that by my former letters. But when she entered into the detailed catalogue of our exact wrongs and our exact rights, I felt all the pusillanimity of my sex, and shrank back in terror.

Her husband, joining us when she was in full tide of eloquence, smiled at me with a kind of saturnine mirth. "Mademoiselle, don't believe a word she says; it is only tall talk! In America the women are absolute tyrants, and it is I who, in concert with my oppressed countrymen, am going in for a platform agitation to restore the Rights of Men."

Upon this there was a lively battle of words between the spouses, in which, I must own, I thought the lady was decidedly worsted.

No, Eulalie, I see nothing in these schemes for altering our relations towards the other sex which would improve our condition. The inequalities we suffer are not imposed by law-not even by convention; they are imposed by nature. Eulalie, you have had an experience unknown to me; you have loved. In that day did you - you, round whom poets and sages and statesmen gather, listening to your words as to an oracledid you feel that your pride of genius had gone out from you that your ambition lived in him whom you loved that his smile was more to you than the applause of a world?

I feel as if love in a woman must destroy her rights of equality — that it gives to her a sovereign even in one who would be inferior to herself if her love did not glorify and crown him. Ah! if I could but merge this terrible egotism which op

I came back to Nice yesterday, consoled for all fatigues in having insured that accuracy in description of localities which my work necessitates.

You are, my poor child, in that revolutionary crisis through which genius passes in youth before it knows its own self, and longs vaguely to do or to be a something other than it has done or has been before. For, not to be unjust to your own powers, genius you have that inborn undefinable essence, including talent, and yet distinct from it. Genius you have, but genius unconcentrated, undisciplined. I see, though you are too diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of singer, because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the thorny crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Mastro, I should be your worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a dazzling success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true vocation, you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be impelled to it by the terrible star which presides over the birth of poets.

Have you, who are so naturally observant, and of late have become so reflective, never remarked that authors, however absorbed in their own craft, do not wish their children to adopt it? The most successful author is perhaps the last person to whom neophytes should come for encouragement. This I think is not the case with the cultivators of the sister arts. The painter, the sculptor, the musician, seem disposed to invite disciples and welcome acolytes. As for those gaged in the practical affairs of life, fathers mostly wished their sons to be as they have been.

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The politician, the lawyer, the mer- words. That is the peculiar distinction chant, each says to his children, "Follow of music. No genuine musician can exmy steps." All parents in practical life plain in words exactly what he means to would at least agree in this - they would convey in his music.

not wish their sons to be poets. There How little a libretto interprets an opera must be some sound cause in the world's-how little we care even to read it! It philosophy for this general concurrence is the music that speaks to us; and how? of digression from a road of which the Through the human voice. We do travellers themselves say to those whom not notice how poor are the words which they love best, "Beware!" the voice warbles. It is the voice itself interpreting the soul of the musician which enchants and enthralls us. And you who have that voice pretend to despise the gift. What! despise the pow er of communicating delight! the power that we authors envy; and rarely, if ever, can we give delight with so little alloy as the singer.

Romance in youth is, if rightly understood, the happiest nutriment of wisdom in after-years; but I would never invite any one to look upon the romance of youth as a thing

To case in periods and embalm in ink.

You say, "Out on the vamped-up hypocrite! Out on the stage-robes and painted cheeks!"

I say, "Out on the morbid spirit which so cynically regards the mere details by which a whole effect on the minds and hearts and souls of races and nations can be produced!"

There, have I scolded you sufficiently? I should scold you more, if I did not see in the affluence of your youth and your intellect the cause of your restlessness.

Riches are always restless. It is only to poverty that the gods give content.

Enfant, have you need of a publisher And when an audience disperses, can to create romance? Is it not in yourself? you guess what griefs the singer may Do not imagine that genius requires for have comforted? what hard hearts he its enjoyment the scratch of the pen and may have softened? what high thoughts types of the printer. Do not suppose he may have awakened? that the poet, the romancier, is most poetic, most romantic, when he is striving, struggling, labouring, to check the rush of his ideas, and materialize the images which visit him as souls into such tangible likenesses of flesh and blood that the highest compliment a reader can bestow on them is to say that they are lifelike? No: the poet's real delight is not in the mechanism of composing; the best part of that delight is in the sympathies he has established with innumerable modifications of life and form, and art and nature sympathies which are often found equally keen in those who have not the same gift of language. The poet is but the interpreter. What of?Truths in the hearts of others. He utters what they feel. Is the joy in the utterance? Nay, it is in the feeling itself. So, my dear, dark-bright child of song, when I bade thee open out of the beaten thoroughfare, paths into the meads and river-banks at either side of the formal hedgerows, rightly dost thou add that I enjoined thee to make thine art thy companion. In the culture of that art for which you are so eminently gifted, you will find the ideal life ever beside the real. Are you not ashamed to tell me that in that art you do but utter the thoughts of others? You utter them in music; through the music you not only give to the thoughts a new character, but you make them reproductive of fresh thoughts in your audience.

You said very truly that you found in composing you could put into music thoughts which you could not put into

You question me about love: you ask if I have ever bowed to a master, ever merged my life in another's: expect no answer on this from me. Circe herself could give no answer to the simplest maid, who, never having loved, asks, "What is love?

In the history of the passions each human heart is a world in itself; its experience profits no others. In no two lives does love play the same part or bequeath the same record.

I know not whether I am glad or sorry that the word "love" now falls on my ear with a sound as slight and as faint as the dropping of a leaf in autumn may fall on thine.

I volunteer but this lesson, the wisest I can give, if thou canst understand it: as I bade thee take art into thy life, so learn to look on life itself as an art. Thou couldst discover the charm in Tasso; thou couldst perceive that the requisite of all art, that which pleases, is in the harmony of proportion. We lose

ture most beautiful.

Love proportioned, adorns the homeliest existence; love disproportioned, deforms the fairest.

Alas! wilt thou remember this warning when the time comes in which it may be needed? G

E

From The Contemporary Review. MENDICITY: FROM A CLERICAL POINT

OF VIEW.

sight of beauty if we exaggerate the fea- tain in the army, another a lieutenant in the navy. Another has committed a crime which weighs on his conscience, and he has come for advice as to whether he should deliver himself up to justice; only the crime was committed at Southampton or Brighton, and he has not the means to pay his fare. Another is an author, who has just lost his wife, and, what with her illness and funeral, he has been put to such heavy expenses that he is obliged to have recourse to what he would never otherwise have thought of the soliciting of your attention to his last work. Another has difficulties on the A CLERGYMAN, especially in London, subject of prayer, and having, by a fortuhas much experience of mendicants nate coincidence, heard your last sermon, of every degree, from the pretentious has entertained a hope, from some words "solicitor" down to the humble "loafer." you let fall in that excellent discourse, The latter he finds, sometimes makes, that you are able to set his perplexity at in more or less abundance, in his own rest. He will probably, if you are of a parish. The "solicitors," coming he hospitable disposition, get at least a lunknows not whence, find him, and lose no cheon or two out of you. Whether he has time in making his acquaintance. No the ulterior design of making a great hit sooner is he settled in his lodgings, on by publishing "The Answers of the his appointment to his first curacy, than Clergy to an Inquiring Spirit," remains to they are upon him; for they like to catch be seen. him whilst he is young and innocent. Such are the master mendicants with They come with loud double knock; they whom the London curate comes in conenter his room with the confident air of tact during the period of his deaconship; old friends; they salute him by name; and as long as he cordially receives them, they shake hands with him, talk with him and is willing to "lend" them the trifle about the weather, inquire if he is any they may happen to want, so long the relation to some one of the same name in succession of such visitors is brisk and such and such a town, and sometimes continuous. But sooner or later he diseven mention the names of some of his covers that he is obliged to make a stand college friends. Finally it turns out that against them. As they are not his parthey are in a little temporary difficulty; ishioners, he can only relieve them out of and of course it is impossible for him to his own pocket; and as he is seldom be hard-hearted towards gentlemen with overburdened with cash, he must make whom he has been engaged in pleasant up his mind to discourage their visits, in conversation. How do they manage so order to save himself from becoming an quickly to know all about him? Do they inmate of the workhouse. The effect of hang about London House in Ember his decision, if it be resolutely carried week, like crimps about a ship that is be- out, is quickly apparent; for no sooner ing paid off, and somehow contrive to get does he firmly, however politely, dismiss a list of all the candidates for ordination, a few of the brethren without acceding to so that they may lose no time in setting their requests, than a perceptible diminuto work? Do they, at whatever head-tion of their visits takes place.

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Not that

quarters they may frequent, take in the he need expect to be ever quite free from Clergy List," the "Clerical Directory," them. To say nothing of stray practithe "University Calendars," the "Eccle- tioners, perhaps unconnected with headsiastical Gazette," &c.? Do they em- quarters, who from time to time will wait ploy a secretary, whose business it is to upon him, some even of his earliest visregister each new comer, and to record itors, as years roll on, will occasionally all the information that can be procured reappear. Either they forget that they about him? No doubt they are quite have paid him a previous visit, or they equal to the organization of such a system. reckon on his having forgotten it. Some But I have no light to throw upon the time ago an elderly gentleman called subject. Various are the characters they upon me, and sent in his card, on which One is a brother clergyman, was printed the "Rev.

assume.

M.A." I

another a scripture reader, another a cap-suppress the name, because it is one

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