seemed to be in a kind of nervous rapture at hearing again the supreme and willing singer.  Procter moved away into a dim corner of the room, and held his tremulous hand over his eyes.  The old poet’s sensitive spirit seemed at times to be going out on the breath of the glorious artist who was thrilling us all with her power.  Mrs. Jameson bent forward to watch every motion of her idol, looking applause at every noble passage.  Another lady, whom I did not know, was tremulous with excitement, and I could well imagine what might have taken place when the “impassioned chantress” sang and enacted Semiramide as I have heard it described.  Every one present was inspired by her fine mien, as well as by her transcendent voice.  Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Cherubini,—­how she flung herself that night, with all her gifts, into their highest compositions!  As she rose and was walking away from the piano, after singing an air from the “Medea” with a pathos that no musically uneducated pen like mine can or ought to attempt a description of, some one intercepted her and whispered a request.  Again she turned, and walked toward the instrument like a queen among her admiring court.  A flash of lightning, followed by a peal of thunder that jarred the house, stopped her for a moment on her way to the piano.  A sudden summer tempest was gathering, and crash after crash made it impossible for her to begin.  As she stood waiting for the “elemental fury” to subside, her attitude was quite worthy of the niece of Mrs. Siddons.  When the thunder had grown less frequent, she threw back her beautiful classic head and touched the keys.  The air she had been called upon to sing was so wild and weird, a dead silence fell upon the room, and an influence as of terror pervaded the whole assembly.  It was a song by Dessauer, which he had composed for her voice, the words by Tennyson.  No one who was present that evening can forget how she broke the silence with

    “We were two daughters of one race,”

or how she uttered the words,

    “The wind is roaring in turret and tree.”

It was like a scene in a great tragedy, and then I fully understood the worship she had won as belonging only to those consummate artists who have arisen to dignify and ennoble the lyric stage.  As we left the house Procter said, “You are in great luck to-night.  I never heard her sing more divinely.”

The Poet frequently spoke to me of the old days when he was contributing to the “London Magazine,” which fifty years ago was deservedly so popular in Great Britain.  All the “best talent” (to use a modern advertisement phrase) wrote for it.  Carlyle sent his papers on Schiller to be printed in it; De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” appeared in its pages; and the essays of “Elia” came out first in that potent periodical; Landor, Keats, and John Bowring contributed to it; and to have printed a prose or poetical article in the “London” entitled