e is soft but poignant. Some songs--the
"Adelaide," for example--are songs to make one commit suicide. But this
sort of music stirs and delights while it mocks with the sweetness which
soothes us not. "She kept me awake all night, as a strain of Mozart's
might do," Keats wrote of his Charmian. There was no song this special
songstress sang which she did not make her own by a peculiar and
powerful effort. Her instinct was to rouse, charm, fascinate her little
audience. Not to move her hearers was to her not to sing, and when she
sang as she wished she could sweep away his world of ideas from her
listener and recreate a new one. In one song, an Italian composition
called "The Dream," she always seemed to be carried beyond herself. In
reading Tourgeneff's description of Iakof's singing I could only think
of Sara X----: "Iakof became more and more excited; completely master of
himself, he gave himself up entirely to the inspiration that had taken
possession of him. His voice no longer trembled; it no longer betrayed
anything but the emotion of passion, that emotion that so rapidly
communicates itself to the hearers. One evening I was by the sea when
the tide was coming in; the murmur of the waves was becoming more and
more distinct. I saw a gull motionless on the shore, with its white
breast facing the purplish sea; from time to time it spread its enormous
wings and seemed to greet the incoming waves and the disk of the sun.
This came to my mind at that moment." And as I read these words of
Tourgeneff's, Sara X---- singing "The Dream" came to my mind.

A less dramatic singer, but an incomparable singer of Scotch ballads,
and indeed of all ballads, at the same period of my life made an
imperishable impression upon my mind. Nothing can surpass certain Scotch
ballads for the faculty of quickening into susceptibility the elementary
poetry which underlies human nature. Every man and every woman becomes
again an individual man, an individual woman, who is moved by "John
Anderson, my Jo, John," or "Auld Robin Gray." Never was so sweet a voice
as this singer's, never did woman have a higher gift of rescuing the
soul from every-day use and wont and giving it glimpses from the
mountain-summit and the thrill and inspiration which come from the wider
view and the purer air. She gave her gift, she enriched the world, and
her songs are still incorporate in the hearts and souls of those who
loved her.

We do not hear songs enough in our