not hindered of her purpose by a break now and then in her voice, the bubble of a note or so. She slides over it as if it were a molehill under her chariot wheels, and abates nothing of her triumphant progress; nay, adds a grace and a dignity on the strength of it, as if it were a new proof how indifferent to the spirit of the passage was the ground the most mate rial to those who can look no higher. Besides, there is a suffering and permission in it that belongs emphatically to passion. If it were for want of skill or deliberation, it would be another thing. But in the rich haste of emotion, pearls are dropped as of no consequence. The profusion of real wealth allows us to notice them only as things that would make others poor.

Being closer to Madame Pasta than usual this night, we had a completer opportunity of noticing the extraordinary grace of her movements. She is never at a loss, because she never thinks of being so. She leaves the whole matter to truth and nature, and these settle it for her, as completely as they do for an infant. You might make a picture from any one of her postures. A favorite action of hers, and one extremely touching, is, after venting a passion of more than usual force, to put up her hands before her eyes, laying and shutting up, as it were, her looks in them, as if to hide from herself the sight of her own emotion. When she opens her arms in a transport of affection, leaning at the same time a little back, and breathing and looking as true as truth could wish, her heart seems to come forward for one as real, and her arms to wait the sanction of its acknowledgment. For all arms, be it

observed, are not arms, whatever they pretend; any more than all that pretends to be love is love, or all eyes have an insight. Some arms are a sort of fore legs in air, merely to help people's walking. Others have machines at the end of them, to take up victuals and drink with, or occasionally to scratch out one's eyes. Others, more amiable, are to hang armlets and bracelets on, or to be admired for a skin or a shape; and then ladies put them in kid gloves, on purpose to take them off, and lift them indifferently to their cheek with rings on their fingers, and people say, What an arm Mrs. Timson has! But the real arms are to serve and love with, to clasp with; to be honest and true arms, content to be admired for their own sakes if the possessor be worthy, but happy to enable you to lose sight of them for the sake of the heart and the honest countenance. It is out of an instinct to this purpose (for the least of our gestures have their reason, if we did but scan it) that Madame Pasta throws back her arms, as if things only in waiting, and brings forward her heart, as if the approbation of that alone would sanction their use. It is for a similar reason, that we admire those women who can afford to make no display of the beauty of any particular limb, but reserve it for the objects of their love and respect to find out. It shows they are richer than in mere limbs. And, for the same reason, one hates all that French dancing, with fine showy limbs and senseless faces, which follows the musical performances at this house, and is just the antipodes of all that charms us in Pasta's singing. If her limbs were among the poorest in the world, they would become precious as warmth

and light, with that smile and those eyes; whereas, if a French dancer could, by any possibility, have limbs like a Venus, with a face no fitter to look at for ten minutes, or for one, than nineteen out of twenty of them possess, she might as well, to our taste, be as wooden and pointed all over as a Dutch doll; which, indeed, in her inanimate posture-makings and senseless right angles of toe, she very much resembles. These people are made up out of the toyshop. They are dolls in their quieter moments, and tee-totums in their livelier. A mathematician should marry one of them for a pair of compasses.

We must not forget to mention that Madame Caradori, whose illness had been previously stated to the public, went through her part in the opera in spite of it, though evidently in a state of suffering. She could, of course, be expected to do little; but what she did was good, and, at least, wanted nothing of its touchingness. There is, at all times, something amiable in the manner and appearance of this singer. Her more than usual delicacy the other night, together with her white dress, which had a long bodice with a cross over it, and her hanging, uniform-looking sleeves, gave her the appearance of a Madonna in one of Raphael's pictures.

We must relate an anecdote of Madame Pasta, highly corroborative of what has been said of her. Some gentlemen, who knew her well, informed a friend of ours when he was in Paris, that she would come home from the opera, and sit in a passion of tears at the recollection of what she had been acting.

They told him that nothing could be more unaffected, and that she would say she knew it to be idle, but that she could not get the thing out of her head." This is just what imaginative people would expect her to say. She never pretended that she had taken herself for the character she represented, but she had sympathized with it so strongly that it became the next thing to reality; and if our hearts can be touched and our color changed by the mere perusal of a tragedy, how much more may not a woman's nature be moved that has been almost identified with the calamities in it; that, by force of imagination, has brought the soul of another to inhabit her own warm being; and has entertained it there as the very guest of humanity, giving it her own heart to agitate, and taking upon herself the burden of its infirmities! IS2S.

D

ON FRENCH OPERA DANCING.

ANCING is either the representation of lovemaking, or it is that of pure animal spirits, giving way to their propensity to motion. It is the latter, most probably, that strikes out the first idea of it, as an art; the former, that completes and gives it a sentiment. The rudest savages dance round a visitor. Politer ones treat him with a dance of the

sexes.

But French opera dancing is neither the one nor the other. It pretends both, only to show how little it

has to do with either. There is love in the plot; there is mirth in the stage directions: but you find it nowhere else. Think of a man making love, with no love in his countenance! of a girl, as merry as a grig, but destitute of the least expression of it, except in her toe! A French ballet is like a rehearsal, with the emotion left out. There is scenery; there are dresses and decorations; some story is supposed to be going on; but the actors are really apart from all this; wrapped up in themselves, and anxious for nothing but to astonish with their respective legs, and fetch down applause from the galleries with a jump.

Enter, for instance, two lovers, with a multitude of subordinate lovers to dance for them while they rest. The scene is in Turkey, in Italy, in Cyprus; but it might as well be in the dancing-master's school-room, for anything it has to do with the performers. Forward comes the gentleman, walking very badly, like all dancers by profession. He bridles, he balances himself, he looks as wooden in the face as a barber's block, he begins capering. That there is no meaning in his capers but to astonish, is evident; for, in his greatest efforts, he always pays the least attention to his love. If it is love-making, it is the oddest in the world, for the lady is forgotten, the gentleman capers by himself, and he expresses his passion by seeing how many jumps he can take, how often he can quiver his feet before he comes down, how eminently he can stand on one leg, and, finally, how long he can spin round like a tee-totum, as if he had no brain to be made giddy with. Suddenly he stops, like a piece of lead; and having received his applause for