standing by
the folding-doors of the drawing-room, while Lablache finished a song
which he had begun before I came in, at the end of which he came up to
me and said, "You cannot think how you frightened me, when first I saw
you standing in that doorway; you looked so absolutely like Malibran,
que je ne savais en verite pas ce que c'etait." Malibran's appearance
was a memorable event in the whole musical world of Europe, throughout
which her progress from capital to capital was one uninterrupted
triumph; the enthusiasm, as is general in such cases, growing with its
further and wider spread, so that at Venice she was allowed, in spite of
old-established law and custom, to go about in a gold and crimson
gondola, as fine as the Bucentaur itself, instead of the floating
hearses that haunt the sea-paved thoroughfares, and that did not please
her gay and magnificent taste.

Her _debut_ in England was an absolute conquest of the nation; and when
it was shocked by the news of her untimely death, hundreds of those
unsympathetic, unaesthetic, unenthusiastic English people put mourning on
for the wonderfully gifted young woman, snatched away in the midst of
her brilliant career. Madame Malibran composed some charming songs, but
her great reputation derives little of its luster from them,--that great
reputation already a mere tradition.

At a challenge I would not decline, I ventured upon the following harsh
and ungraceful but literal translation of some of the stanzas from
Alfred de Musset's fine lament for Malibran. My poetical competitor
produced an admirable version of them, and has achieved translations of
other of his verses, as perfect as translations can be; a literary feat
of extraordinary difficulty, with the works of so essentially national a
writer, a genius so peculiarly French, as De Musset.

"Oh, Maria Felicia! the painter and bard
Behind them, in dying, leave undying heirs.
The night of oblivion their memory spares,
And their great eager souls, other action debarred,
Against death, against time, having valiantly warred,
Though struck down in the strife, claim its trophies as theirs.

"In the iron engraved, one his thought leaves enshrined;
With a golden-sweet cadence another's entwined
Makes for ever all those who shall hear it his friends.
Though he died, on the canvas lives Raphael's mind;
And from death's darkest doom till this world of ours ends,
The