nose. Again at a service in the Chapel near it are sev eral palatial buildings for the reception of est about the temple which Constantine erected to the Divine Wisdom, and which still raises its limestone walls and leaden domes high above the last hill between the Propontis and the Golden Horn. There she still stands, the ancient Sophia. Like a venerable dame in a white robe and with her gray head resting on her mighty crutches, she gazes over the crowds that throng about her in the present, away to the land and sea in the distance. Deserted by her champions and her children, this Christian of a thousand years was forcibly converted to Islam. But she turns away from the grave of the Prophet and looks to the east at the face of the rising sun, to the south toward Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria, Corinth, and the Redeemer's Grave, to the west which deserted her, and to the north whence she expects her deliverance. Fire and siege, riot, civil war and fanatical destruction, earthquakes, storms, and tempests have broken their strength against these walls which have received Christian, Heathen, and Mohammedan emperors beneath their arches." It is difficult to part from Moltke's Letters without citing the passage which he devotes to the Mosque of St. Sophia, and with which I shall conclude. Here again Kinglake's immortal description of the Sphinx presents a singular parallel in spirit and dignity" Memories cluster thick--Macmillan's Magazine. JENNY LIND.* BY REV. H. R. HAWEIS. A LIFE of more ideal completeness than that of Jenny Lind it is hardly possible to imagine. All its aims were worthy; all were achieved; rise, development, progress, culmination, immense gifts, numerous opportunities, a great example of honest work and spotless integrity, and a splendid legacy of benefactions innumerable, in the shape of hospitals, schools, and institutes, founded by her own unaided efforts, in addition to unknown and unnumbered private bounties ;-such is the record of Jenny Lind's life, and it has assuredly not been written in vain. The phases of this unique career seem to follow each other with an almost dramatic propriety and scenic completeness. She appears to us on her way attended by the clamor, and heat, and vociferous applause of the surging multitude. But she moves like one all robed in white-a * An excerpt from the original article, the unessential portions having been omitted by the editor of THE ECLECTIC. NEW SERIES.-VOL, LIV., No, 2. 14 saintly presence, inspired, somnambulistic, and unconscious of the lower world—with eyes raised heavenward, absorbed only in her most perfect and all-purifying work; passing through a troubled and polluted world of chicanery and lust--as a beam of sunlight passes into the depths of foul and noisome caverns, yet without contracting any stain. She seems to me at once the most real and the most ideal creature ever born. I can see the little plain girl of nine years old, with her sensitive face and spare figure-shrinking, suspicious, not kindly treated at home, but ever singing to herself and her cat "with the blue ribbon," both seated in the deep window niche. The passers-by stop to listen; the good Herr Crælius, Court singingmaster, is attracted, will have her officially trained. Behold, the incredulous and severe Herr Puke, who will hardly consent to listen to the little girl, and then bursts out crying at the exquisite pathos of the child's voice. What a gift of tears, what larmes dans le gosier she had! How many more were to cry at that voice in the coming years. 66 Little Jenny is at last installed as pupil at the Court Theatre, to be taught " piano, religion, French, history, geography, writing, arithmetic, and drawing,' "and so trained for the stage. She meets with kind people-specially her maternal grandmother, who impresses her sensitive, eager heart with that steady moral principle and those deep religious feelings which, as the years lengthened, became her most striking characteristics. At first Jenny seemed destined for the spoken drama; she was by nature a consummate actress-such abandon and spontaneity! But her extraordinary voice asserted itself irresistibly. It was said by a great critic, "If she had not been the greatest singer, she would still have been the greatest actress of the age. She was destined to be both. At eighteen, her singing-mistress listened to her in silence one day; Jenny had been doing her very best to please her, and felt disappointed at no least word of approval. Am I then so stupid?" she said, with a little pout. My child," said her mistress, while the tears coursed down her own cheeks, "I have nothing to teach you; do as Nature tells you !" A crisis came early in her young life. She had much praise at Stockholm. The theatre directors already felt themselves repaid; they engaged her at a modest salary; the whole town was soon talking about her, but she was diffident-suspicious of herself. "On the 7th of May," she says, "I got up one creature, I went to bed another;" that night she had found her power, it was as Agatha' in Weber's Freyschütz" that she placed her foot firmly on the rung of that ladder of European fame she was about so laboriously but so triumphantly to scale. She now plunged into the full swing of an operatic career, appearing frequently in the "Vestalin, a part she considered her best-but which in England at least was discarded for "Sonnambula" and the "Daughter of the Regiment." "Zauberflöte, "Robert le Diable," "Lucia," Norma," and almost all the other popular operas of that day afforded her opportunities for a succession of unique triumphs at the Court Theatre, Stockholm, where, by June 19th, 1841, she had appeared 447 times. All were enraptured; she alone 66 66 66 was dissatisfied-she alone knew. Sle knew she could not sing. She knew that no one in Stockholm could teach her what she wanted to learn. She could captivate, she could act, but no raptures could blind her to her own defects, nor for a moment dim the right ideal of artistic excellence which she had divined for herself. Jenny Lind must go to Paris. Firm, patient, little toiler with the plain face, whose smile Dean Stanley likened to Dr. Pusey's, whose eyes seemed lighted with the stars, whose laugh rang out like the merry notes of woodland birds. Face, with the magic of the heart in it, full of soul-beauty which had but to show itself, and all other stage beauties disappeared, and people cried and laughed, and went mad for joy, and waited for hours, and sat up all night, to get a fleeting glimpse of it. Brave little figure, already rounded with glowing, budding womanhood, no longer so maigre, beautiful in every movement, transfused with the flowing grace, the poetry of motion, which is of the soul the soul ever shining through. What was the secret of that undulating, unconscious grace that riveted all eyes whenever she appeared? What was the magnetism of those movements, so chaste, so dignified, so ideally dowered with " the eternal feminine"? No one could tell, all could feel, but none could analyze. And such an one thought it needful, being what she was, with nobles at her feet, courts thrown open to her, mobs surrounding her in the street, this little plain Stockholm girl thought it worth while, knew it to be her duty, to toil and amass a litte travelling capital, to leave all her home triumphs, and go far away to Paris, and pay 20 francs an hour for lessons, and live unknown and even unappreciated, if by any means she could get Garcia, the greatest singing-master in the world, to teach her how to sing. That was Jenny Lind all over, obstinately indifferent to every one's opinion in high art matters but her own, utterly unmoved by praise though sensitive to blame, only bent on the highest ; for her it was ever this, and only this, we needs must love the highest when we see it." 66 So to Paris she came, a lonely unknown wanderer, with only the faint murmurs of her Swedish reputation behind her. What was that to a world intoxicated with Persiani, Malibran, Sontag, Grisi, and Cata lani? Little did Signor Garcia, when at last he consented to hear her, and she broke down in an aria from "Der Freyschütz," dream that this plain, trembling girl was destined to outshine all these stars. She came to Paris tired. She had oversung herself in her money-getting tour. She had a bad method; her voice was worn, and some notes very seriously injured. Mademoiselle," said the terrible Garcia, "it is useless for me to teach you; you have no voice left, "-not as is currently reported, "vous n'avez pas de voix," but vous n'avez plus de voix.' 66 But Jenny knew. She went back to Garcia again and again. He was moved by her earnestness. She became a docile slave. She learned to submit. She consented to rest absolutely, to study a new method, then to unlearn all the singing she knew. She filled reams of copybooks, followed out all Garcia's mandates to the letter, and thus he consented to do for her what he could. 66 a She was satisfied. More than ever now she felt her defects, but she learned how to remove them. Not a touch of jealousy in her nature meanwhile. Inferior but better taught women took the lead of her. She admitted their right, rejoiced especially in the success of one such-" sweet girl." She said, "I can learn all she knows, but she can never learn what I know." That again was Jenny all over : absolute consciousness of inborn power. "No one acts as I act," she said quite unaffectedly to an intimate friend. Of Garcia, after nine months of incessant work and personal obscurity, she says, By Garcia alone have I been taught a few important things," but she added, "I sing after no one's method-the greater part of what I can do in my art I have myself acquired by incredible labor in spite of astonishing difficulties." In acting she neither sought nor required any instruction. Her acting was a kind of inspired second nature to her-no one acts as I act and the age quite agreed with her. Was Paris a disappointment to Jenny Perhaps yes and no? The fact that she was heard privately by Meyerbeer and one or two others on the grand Paris stage without appearing to be quite adequate, and that her occasional private singing in that spoiled capital does not at this period seem to have excited much enthusiasm, would certainly have justified some disappointment; but the Paris atmosphere stifled her, the moral tone displeased her. "What is wanted here is admirers," she writes home with a sort of chaste scorn; "there I say stop!" "The sacrifice of honor and reputation" was too great a price to pay for operatic success in Paris, and Jenny turned away sickened from the spectacle of frivolity, greed, and corruption, and longed to get home. How she bore herself in Paris is tenderly recorded with admiration by Madame Ruffiaques, with whom she lodged. "I could scarcely have believed," said that lady with evident emotion, "such dignity of conduct possible in a young person coming to Paris alone." But a change was at hand. Jenny was now pressed to go back and accept an engagement at the Royal Theatre, Stockholm-a modest engagement of only £150 a year. But the management who had trained her from childhood had already made proof of her surprising gifts, and expected a quick return, and they got it. She gave herself joyfully, ungrudgingly, gratefully-besides, was not Stockholm her home, and was not Home, Home, Sweet Home !"-throughout life to be to her the most sacred of all words. "Land of my birth," she exclaimed ; "oh that I could one day show how dear thou art to me." According to a custom not uncommon in Sweden, she now assumed the position of a young girl acting on her own responsibility, and adopted a state guardian in the person of that excellent counsellor, Herr Munthe, who advised her wisely as long as he lived, and kept all her precious letters, which were found in a packet after his death, labelled "The Mirror of a Noble Soul." 66 After a steady round of operas at Stockholm, which served to settle her style, and fully proved the extent of her obligations to Garcia, who had helped her to add to the high priesthood of Nature the high priesthood of Art, Jenny made a triumphant tour through Denmark-meeting among other celebrities Hans Andersen and Geiger, the poet, who continually urged her to seek a wider field—“ he kicked me out into the world," she used to say laughingly. She listened ever with reluctance to the voices beyond the sea, but was at last persuaded to go to Berlin. The offers made her were splendid. Meyerbeer was her enthusiastic sponsor. She Bunn offered her £50 a night, which seemed to her a great deal then; but as he had paid Malibran £125 a night in advance, and had given her £5200 for forty nights in 1833, Bunn's proposal to Jenny Lind, whose attraction proved to be greater than Malibran's, was far from liberal, although she did not decline it on that account, but simply because she had a rooted objection to London, and found it impossible to learn English in the time. accordingly went off straight to Dresden with her aunt to study German, and prepare herself for the great ordeal in the Prussian capital. As the time approached she grew desperately nervous and restless -a profound diffidence and astonishing distrust of self alternated oddly enough in her, or rather seemed to co-exist, with a deep-seated consciousness of inborn superiority. Indeed something like despair and the most profound depression seemed to seize upon her before each of her great- In 1845 Jenny Lind first met our Queen est triumphs at Berlin, Vienna, and Lon- and Prince Albert at the Bonn Beethoven don. What if her artistic reputation, so Festival. The Queen was instantly struck undisputed in Sweden, where she had with her supreme talent, and expressed a reigned without a rival, should wither in wish to see her in England. Jenny's a moment in the air still laden with the progress through Germany was every where incense offered to Sontag and Malibran. accompanied by the most singular demonA few days set the matter at rest. She strations. People hung about the streets did not appear at first in the part of Vielka in crowds to catch a sight of her. Where("Camp in Silesia"), destined for her by ever she sang the prices went up, her Meyerbeer, as she found it had been prom- hotels were besieged, the horses were ised to some one else as well-but her ap- taken out of her carriage, and she was pearance in "Norma," although it gave constantly being dragged in state. The rise to endless controversies, and directly police, and even the cavalry, had to be traversed Grisi's canonized conception of called out. the rôle was a veritable triumph. The sequel is almost historical, and it certainly forms one of the most singular episodes in the history of musical art. I can but glance at the oft-told tale; how one night the excitement in the Berlin opera-house reached to a frantic pitch-how the British ambassador received the young prima between the acts in his box, where, surrounded by members of the Berlin aristocracy, she found herself suddenly face to face with Mr. Bunn, the Drury Lane manager, whose overtures she had persistently declined-how under immediate pressure from Lord Westmoreland, our diplomatic representative, she was induced then and there to put her name to a contract with Bunn, in which she undertook to sing at Drury Lane-and then all the infinite annoyance and vexations which followed on her inability or unwillingness to fulfil the contract and how she subsequently two years afterward sang in London, not at Drury Lane for Mr Bunn, but at Her Majesty's for Mr. Lumley into all this tangled story I have no nind to enter here it is fully gone into, chapter and verse, in vol. ii., from which it plainly appears that there was no mala fides on the part of Jenny Lind, and that if she erred, it was from inexperience at first and generosity afterward. On one occasion, she had to stay nearly all night at the theatre, because the crowds waiting outside to see her come out rendered the streets dangerous, and nothing short of brute force would induce them to disperse. What was soon known throughout Europe as the "Jenny Lind mania" seemed to seize upon the whole population of a town when she entered it, and all this time, Jenny herself was devoured by the intense longing to hide away :-"Moi qui vent toujour être la dernière," as she said to Mrs. Grote. There was never any change in this extraordinary girl, she remained absolutely unaffected, simple and unspoiled in the midst of this frantic and unparalleled homage. What is more extraordinary still is that on approaching Vienna she was overcome with her old stage nervousness, and profound sense of unfitness to appear in so large a theatre. There was no affectation about this; Mendelssohn foresaw it, and wrote to Hauser, afterward Director of the Munich Conservatoire, to stand by her with sound advice and encouragement. Down to the last she dreaded new publics, and she was, as far back as 1844, bent upon retiring from the operatic stage altogether. She had a passionate love of dramatic art, a lofty conception of the powers and possibilities of the stage-she even broke off her engagement with a young man whose family prejudices seemed to her to cast a slur upon her profession as an actress-but the actual environments of the theatre, the low moral tone, the intrigue, the jealousies of stage life, were profoundly distasteful to her, and the downright exhaustion from excitement, late hours, stifling atmosphere, and long rehearsals tried her abnormally sensitive nervous system severely. She did not like crowds, she did not care for applause; she loved woods and water, and the quiet peace of country life. To wander among the hills, hand in hand with some friend -that was her paradise. She dreamed of a home of her own, too, sometimes. She called her stage life roofless and lonely." She was domestic and simple in her real tastes, ate and drank sparely, took no wine, and at one time neither tea nor coffee. She had her own definite ideas about her future. She would get together a little money, enough to keep herself and her mother in comfort at Stockholm, and then enjoy the luxury of singing for charities, and helping the suffering and forlorn for the rest of her life. Her genius she fully recognized as a sacred trust-something that had been given her by God, to be used for His glory and the good of man. But to London she would not go, on that she was determined. She was sure they would not like her, and she did not want a new sphere even if they did. It was in 1846 that, after being besieged in vain by Lumley, of Her Majesty's Theatre, and promised even higher terms than Grisi, Mendelssohn, who had been adored in England, and who brought out his " Elijah" there at the Birmingham (1846) Festival, succeeded in overcoming Jenny's scruples. "I am going to London," she writes, "and Mendelssohn alone was able to induce me to do Everything combined to make Jenny Lind's appearance in London truly sensational, without the least effort on her part. For ten years Sweden and Germany had been singing her praises, and the galaxy of operatic stars-Grisi, Tamburini, Sontag, Lablache, and Gardoni, who had for some time ruled managers with a rod of iron-had not prevented the fame of the Swedish nightingale from reaching our shores. Even the Bunn controversy had raised expectation to the highest pitch. 66 At the same time. the fortunes of Her Majesty's, Covent Garden, were down. All the stars except Lablache had quarrelled with Lumley and gone over to Drury Lane. Lumley was on the brink of ruin. Where was the counterpoise to balance the attractions of Grisi, Mario, Alboni, and Tamburini? Lumley believed that the incomparable Jenny alone was equal to the task. At last, after endless delays and hesitations-weeks of mental agony to poor Lumley, who was organizing performances to empty houses-at last she was coming. It is useless to try and picture her in words as she appeared to the critics of the period; to say she was rather above the middle height, slender, but peculiarly graceful in figure and action; very fair, with a profusion of beautiful auburn tresses; the expression of the eyes, etc."—all this sort of talk is futile. Her own description of herself as "broadnosed, ugly, and gauche" is scarcely more helpful. When we look at her early portraits the problem seems to grow no clearer. Besides a remarkable daguerreotype in the possession of Mr. Otto Goldschmidt, there are only two portraits-one by Magnus of Berlin, in 1846, and another by Södermark of Stockholm, in 1861-which make the Jenny Lind who was just then turning all the world crazy in the least intelligible. The quiet, intelligent eyes seem, indeed, capable of a world of meaning; the very sweet and delicately pencilled mouth is of extreme beauty; nothing can make the nose good, nor is the forehead high, though the head is finely moulded. The arms and neck are well rounded, the pose exceedingly graceful, and every line of the body, as far as it can be defined, is harmonious; but all that is not Jenny Lind. To characterize her voice is equally inpossible. Mendelssohn, who had heard everybody, said she was the greatest artist he had ever known. Sontag, whose voice was said to be naturally rounder and fuller, praised her to the skies. Lablache thought her incomparable. In listening to one of her wonderful cadenzas on a certain occasion, the open-mouthed band were so electrified that they forgot to come in, and Mendelssohn, who was wielding the bâton, instead of getting into a rage, burst out laughing. The hardened old maestro, Guhr, at the close of a scene in "Sonnambula," threw away |