s. Castle Garden was then the
great concert hall of New York, and I shall never forget the night of
her first appearance. I was a college boy, and Jenny Lind was the first
great singer I ever heard. There were certain cadences in her voice that
overwhelmed the audience with emotion. I remember a clergyman sitting
near me who was so overcome that he was obliged to leave the auditorium.
The school of suffering and sorrow had done as much for her voice as the
Academy of Stockholm.

The woman who had her in charge when a child used to lock her in a room
when she went off to the daily work. There by the hour Jenny would sit
at the window, her only amusement singing, while she stroked her cat on
her lap. But sitting there by the window her voice fell on a listener in
the street. The listener called a music master to stand by the same
window, and he was fascinated and amazed, and took the child to the
director of the Royal Opera, asking for her the advantages of musical
education, and the director roughly said: "What shall we do with that
ugly thing? See what feet she has. And, then, her face; she will never
be presentable. No, we can't take her. Away with her!" But God had
decreed for this child of nature a grand career, and all those sorrows
were woven into her faculty of song. She never could have been what she
became, royally arrayed on the platforms of Berlin and Vienna and Paris
and London and New York, had she not first been the poor girl in the
garret at Stockholm. She had been perfected through suffering. That she
was genuinely Christian I prove not more from her charities than from
these words which she wrote in an album during her triumphal American
tour:

In vain I seek for rest
In all created good;
It leaves me still unblest
And makes me cry for God.
And safe at rest I cannot be
Until my heart finds rest in Thee.

There never was anyone who could equal Jenny Lind in the warble. Some
said it was like a lark, but she surpassed the lark. Oh, what a warble!
I hear it yet. All who heard it thirty-five years ago are hearing it
yet.

I should probably have been a lawyer, except for the prayers of my
mother and father that I should preach the Gospel. Later, I entered the
New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Why I ever thought of any other work
in the world than that which I have done, is another mystery of my
youth. Everything in my heredity and in my heart indicated my career as
a pre