an power of rendering it.
Her mode of uttering sound, of putting forth her voice (the test which
all but Italians, or most carefully Italian-trained singers, fail in),
was as purely unteutonic as possible. She was one of the most perfect
singers I ever heard, and suggests to my memory the quaint praise of the
gypsy vocal performance in the ballad of "Johnny Faa"--

"They sang so sweet,
So very _complete_,"

She was the first Rosina I ever heard who introduced into the scene of
the music-lesson "Rhodes Air," with the famous violin variations, which
she performed by way of a _vocalise_, to the utter amazement of her
noble music-master, I should think, as well as her audience.
Mademoiselle Nilsson is the only prima donna since her day who has at
all reminded me of Sontag, who was lovely to look at, delightful to
listen to, good, amiable, and charming, and, compared with Malibran,
like the evening star to a comet.

Defeated by Malibran's viciousness in rehearsing her death-scene, she
resigned herself to the impromptu imposed upon her, and prepared to
follow her Romeo, wherever _she_ might choose to die; but when the
evening came, Malibran contrived to die close to the foot-lights and in
front of the curtain; Sontag of necessity followed, and fell beside her
there; the drop came down, and there lay the two fair corpses in full
view of the audience, of course unable to rise or move, till a couple of
stage footmen, in red plush breeches, ran in to the rescue, took the
dead Capulet and Montague each by the shoulders, and dragged them off at
the side scenes; the Spanish woman in the heroism of her maliciousness
submitting to this ignominy for the pleasure of subjecting her gentle
German rival to it.

Madame Malibran was always an object of the greatest interest to me, not
only on account of her extraordinary genius, and great and various
gifts, but because of the many details I heard of her youth from M. de
la Forest, the French consul in New York, who knew her as Marie Garcia,
a wild and wayward but most wonderful girl, under her father's
tyrannical and harsh rule during the time they spent in the United
States. He said that there was not a piece of furniture in their
apartment that had not been thrown by the father at the daughter's head,
in the course of the moral and artistic training he bestowed upon her:
it is perhaps wonderful that success in either direction should have
been the result of such a system; but