of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could
magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just
and proper proportion in the real." It must have been like heaven, this
city so stilly and so fair,--for, you see, there were no people there.

Miss Sheppard's plots are not conspicuous, for her characters make
circumstance and are their own fate; still her capacity in that line is
finely exhibited by the plot of the opera of "Alarcos." In mere filling
up, having excepted the incident,--always original and delightful,--the
lofty imagination, and the descriptions of wind and weather,--one of her
best points will be found to be costume, a minor thing, but then there
are few who excel in modern millinery. "Salome was beautiful. Her
splendid delicate dress, all rosy folds, skirt over skirt of drapery
falling softly into each other, made her clear skin dazzle in the midst
of them; and the masses of vivid geraniums here and there without their
leaves were not too gorgeous for her bearing,--nor for her hair, in
whose rich darkness geraniums also glowed, long wreaths curling down
into her neck." Rose in white, with wreaths of rubies weighing down her
slender arms;--Adelaida, with her lace robe like woven light on satin
like woven moon-beams, and large water-lilies in her golden hair;--my
Lady Barres, whose dress "consisted almost always of levantine, with
demi-train and under-petticoat of white brocaded silk peeping through
its open front; the hair showing the shape of the head, and confined by
a narrow band of black velvet across the brow, fastened in the morning
with onyx or agate, in the evening with a brilliant only; she always
wore upon her wrists delicate bands of cambric embroidered with
seed-pearl so minutely that it seemed a pattern wrought out of the
threads of the stuff, and little pearl tassels drooped there scarcely
eclipsing her hands in fairness."

But a far stronger point is the power of portraiture. Seraphael having
been identified, people turned their attention to the other cipher.
Disregarding the orchestral similitude of sound in his name, which, by
the way, nobody pronounces as Aronach instructed, they chose to infer
that Charles Auchester himself was the Herr Joachim, that Starwood
Burney stood for Sterndale Bennett, that Diamid Albany meant Disraeli,
that Zelter figured as Aronach, and that Jenny Lind, of whom Mendelssohn
himself said there would not in a whole century be born anoth