The first time I ever saw her sister, Madame Viardot, she was sitting with mine, who introduced me to her; Pauline Viardot continued talking, now and then, however, stopping to look fixedly at me, and at last exclaimed, “Mais comme elle ressemble a ma Marie!” and one evening at a private concert in London, having arrived late, I remained standing by the folding-doors of the drawing-room, while Lablache finished a song which he had begun before I came in, at the end of which he came up to me and said, “You cannot think how you frightened me, when first I saw you standing in that doorway; you looked so absolutely like Malibran, que je ne savais en verite pas ce que c’etait.”  Malibran’s appearance was a memorable event in the whole musical world of Europe, throughout which her progress from capital to capital was one uninterrupted triumph; the enthusiasm, as is general in such cases, growing with its further and wider spread, so that at Venice she was allowed, in spite of old-established law and custom, to go about in a gold and crimson gondola, as fine as the Bucentaur itself, instead of the floating hearses that haunt the sea-paved thoroughfares, and that did not please her gay and magnificent taste.

Her debut in England was an absolute conquest of the nation; and when it was shocked by the news of her untimely death, hundreds of those unsympathetic, unaesthetic, unenthusiastic English people put mourning on for the wonderfully gifted young woman, snatched away in the midst of her brilliant career.  Madame Malibran composed some charming songs, but her great reputation derives little of its luster from them,—­that great reputation already a mere tradition.

At a challenge I would not decline, I ventured upon the following harsh and ungraceful but literal translation of some of the stanzas from Alfred de Musset’s fine lament for Malibran.  My poetical competitor produced an admirable version of them, and has achieved translations of other of his verses, as perfect as translations can be; a literary feat of extraordinary difficulty, with the works of so essentially national a writer, a genius so peculiarly French, as De Musset.

    “Oh, Maria Felicia! the painter and bard
     Behind them, in dying, leave undying heirs. 
     The night of oblivion their memory spares,
     And their great eager souls, other action debarred,
     Against death, against time, having valiantly warred,
     Though struck down in the strife, claim its trophies as theirs.

    “In the iron engraved, one his thought leaves enshrined;
     With a golden-sweet cadence another’s entwined
     Makes for ever all those who shall hear it his friends. 
     Though he died, on the canvas lives Raphael’s mind;
     And from death’s darkest doom till this world of ours ends,
     The mother-clasped infant his glory defends.