ica and the duties that belong
to us there, and I should be the last person to desire that we should do
so; and so I think henceforth England and I are "Paradises Lost" to each
other,--and this is a very strange life; with which "wise saw," but not
"modern instance," I will conclude, begging you to believe me,

Ever yours most truly,
F. A. B.

[Madame Pasta did return then to the stage, and her brilliant young
rival, Grisi, was to her what the Giessbach would be to a great wave
of the Atlantic. But, alas! she returned once more after that to the
scene of her former triumphs in London; the power, majesty, and
grace of her face, figure, and deportment all gone, her voice
painfully impaired and untrue, her great art unable to remedy, in
any degree, the failure of her natural powers.

She came as an agent and emissary of the political party of Italian
liberty, to help the cause of their _Italia Unita_, and our people
received her with affectionate respect, for the sake of what she had
been; but she accepted their applause with melancholy gestures of
disclaimer, and sorrowful head-shaking over her own decline. Those
who had never heard or seen her before were inclined to laugh; those
who had, _did_ cry.

The latent expression of a face is a curious study for the
physiognomist, and is sometimes strikingly at variance with that
which is habitual, as well as with the general character of the
features. That fine and accurate observer of the symptoms of
humanity, George Eliot, gives her silly, commonplace, little
second-heroine in "Adam Bede," Hester, a pathetic and sentimental
expression, to which nothing in her mind or character corresponds,
and which must have been an inheritance from some ancestress in whom
such an expression had originated with a meaning.

Madame Pasta was not handsome, people of uneducated and unrefined
taste might have called her plain; but she had that indescribable
quality which painters value almost above all others--style, and a
power and sweetness of expression, and a grandeur and grace of
demeanor, that I have never seen surpassed. She was not handsome,
certainly; but she was _beautiful_, and never, by any chance, looked
common or vulgar.

Madame Grisi was almost perfectly handsom