Europe, but he spoke in French-a language in which he could say anything, for not a soul understood him."

Moltke was terribly hampered in one of his journeys by the slowness and indolence of the Turkish official who accompanied him. "Without your chainpagne," he writes, "I should never have towed my fat Effendi so fast from Samsun to Karput. I always held out to him the prospect of a Gumushbashi, or 'SilverHead,' if he rode well and we reached our quarters for the night. On a starry night," he continues, "I was standing on the ruins of the old Roman fortress of Zeugma. Deep down in a rocky ravine below me glittered the Euphrates, and the sound of its waters filled the peaceful evening. There did I see Cyrus and Alexander, Xenophon, Cæsar, and Julian pass by me in the moonlight; from this very point had they seen the empire of Chosroes' dynasty across the river, and seen it exactly as I saw it, for here nature is of stone and unchangeable. So I determined to sacrifice to the memory of the great Roman people those golden grapes which they first introduced into Gaul, and which I had carried from the western to the eastern frontier of their broad empire. I hurled down the bottle which dived, danced, and slipped down the stream toward the Indian Ocean. You will be right, however, in surmising that I had firstemptied it. That bottle had only one fault-it was the last I had."

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The following conversation will remind many of the interview between Kinglake's British traveller and the Pasha :The next night I slept in the tent of a Turcoman chief. After I had made myself as comfortable as I could, the chief, Osman Bey, came in and gave me a friendly greeting. When the influence of coffee and pipes had dispelled the silence in which such visits always begin, he asked for news from my Cimmerian home, much as we should question an inhabitant of the moon were he to fall like an aerolite on our planet. 'Had we got the sea with us?' 'Yes, and we take walks on it in the winter.' 'Did we grow much tobacco?' 'We fetched most of it from the New World.' Was it true that we cut off the ears and tails of our horses?' 'No, we only cut their tails.' 'Had we springs of flowing water?' 'Yes, except during a frost.'

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'Had we any camels?' 'Yes, but they were only shown for money.' 'Did we grow lemons?' 'No.' 'Had we many buffaloes?' 'No.' He was nearly asking me whether the sun shone with us or whether we had nothing but gas. Meanwhile, and with a muttered 'Allah! Allah!' he suppressed the remark that my country must have been originally meant for polar bears."

At Nevsher, on the Kizil-Irmak, a personage named Kara Jehenna, or Black Hell, who had taken a leading part in the massacre of the Janissaries in 1826, refused either to receive Moltke or to give him horses. "I settled matters by walking straight up into his room, where his Hellish Majesty and I met like two men who are equally anxious to surrender no part of their dignity. I took no notice of his presence, had my heavy boots pulled off by my servants, and then, covered as I was with every variety of soil, I marched up to the best seat in the room. It was only then that I saluted my host who, in order to give me a taste of his European manners, answered 'Addio!'

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'What have you heard about me?' said he. 'That you are a good gunner and are called Black Hell.' It is not every one who would have taken this infernal sobriquet as a compliment, but it won my friend's heart. Breakfast and coffee were at once provided, and, in addition, most excellent horses, to the great delight of my Tartar." At Constantinople Moltke overheard some Turkish ladies criticising a party of Jewesses sitting near them in the Valley of Sweet Waters. The ladies were much shocked by the indecent exposure permitted by the Jewish veils, which actually showed the face from the eyebrows to the upper lip, and also by the fact that the she-infidels were drinking brandy. 'Is that propriety?' asked a broad dame. 'Any decent woman would confine herself to a cup of coffee, a pipe of tobacco, et voilà tout! I mention this for the information of ladies at home."

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nose." Again at a service in the Chapel of Peterhof: - "The choir chanted piece of the most impressive kind with a skill that was matchless. Composition and execution were alike unsurpassable. To my abject despair, a venerable Excellency behind me joined in the singing and was always out of tune, sotto voce it is true, but quite loud enough for my ears." A little later :-" We drove to the beautiful Smolnoi Church near it are sev

eral palatial buildings for the reception of spinsters of noble birth. As, however, the youngest of them is, and indeed must be, forty years we did not stay there very long. ..." Again:-" The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul is said to contain the huge cash reserves which form the security for the paper money in circulation... But I did not count them."

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

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." - Macmillan's Magazine.

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.

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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.

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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

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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."

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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

had oversung herself in her money-getting tour. She had a bad method; her voice was worn, and some notes very seriously injured.

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"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." 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.

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-"a 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."

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