she died was spent in helping others, by correspondence and personal contact, to submit to the sorrows God had cast upon them.  She believed, with Milton, that it is miserable enough to be blind, but still more miserable not to be able to bear blindness.  Her own earlier life had been darkened by griefs, and she knew from a deep experience what it was to enter the cloud and stand waiting and hoping in the shadows.  In her instructive and delightful society I spent many an hour twenty years ago in the houses of Procter and Rogers and Kenyon.  Procter, knowing my admiration of the Kemble family, frequently led the conversation up to that regal line which included so many men and women of genius.  Mrs. Jameson was never weary of being questioned as to the legitimate supremacy of Mrs. Siddons and her nieces, Fanny and Adelaide Kemble.  While Rogers talked of Garrick, and Procter of Kean, she had no enthusiasms that were not bounded in by those fine spirits whom she had watched and worshipped from her earliest years.

Now and then in the garden of life we get that special bite out of the sunny side of a peach.  One of my own memorable experiences in that way came in this wise.  I had heard, long before I went abroad, so much of the singing of the youngest child of the “Olympian dynasty,” Adelaide Kemble, so much of a brief career crowded with triumphs on the lyric stage, that I longed, if it might be possible, to listen to the “true daughter of her race.”  The rest of her family for years had been, as it were, “nourished on Shakespeare,” and achieved greatness in that high walk of genius; but now came one who could interpret Mozart, Bellini, and Mercadante, one who could equal what Pasta and Malibran and Persiani and Grisi had taught the world to understand and worship.  “Ah!” said a friend, “if you could only hear her sing ’Casta Diva’!” “Yes,” said another, “and ’Auld Robin Gray’!” No wonder, I thought, at the universal enthusiasm for a vocal and lyrical artist who can alternate with equal power from “Casta Diva” to “Auld Robin Gray.”  I must hear her!  She had left the stage, after a brief glory upon it, but as Madame Sartoris she sometimes sang at home to her guests.

“We are invited to hear some music, this evening,” said Procter to me one day, “and you must go with us.”  I went, and our hostess was the once magnificent prima donna! At intervals throughout the evening, with a voice

    “That crowds and hurries and precipitates
    With thick fast warble its delicious notes,”

she poured out her full soul in melody.  We all know her now as the author of that exquisite “Week in a French Country-House,” and her fascinating book somehow always mingles itself in my memory with the enchanted evening when I heard her sing.  As she sat at the piano in all her majestic beauty, I imagined her a sort of later St. Cecilia, and could have wished for another Raphael to paint her worthily.  Henry Chorley, who was present on that memorable evening,