When she was ill for a few days in Berlin, Meyerbeer wrote to her and asked that Heaven might grant her “relief from those doubts in the power of your talent which turn even your days of triumph into days of anxiety.” It was just that which she needed to perfect her art and her personality, but Meyerbeer was asking too much from Heaven. These doubts were a concentrated compound, consisting of lack of self-confidence, pious preoccupations and moral repressions, together with a crafty fear of losing altogether whatever she had already gained. They did not affect her popularity, for even with her doubts she did sing wherever she had the opportunity, but they undoubtedly affected her art, and without them she might have been the greatest singer the world has ever known. With them she was held back from supreme artistic triumph in this world that she might enjoy comfort in the next, and it is to be hoped that her spiritual promises to herself have been fulfilled. There were disparagers of Jenny Lind, but they rarely found fault any more discriminately than those who shrieked praise of both her personality and her powers. The testimony of several great artists in other fields, who found her unimportant and even dull, was natural, for she must have been so to any one who could not become enraptured with her vocal perfection, but yet it is a reflection on the powers of that voice that it could not move the emotions of several great men, unprejudiced by too much technical knowledge of music. Carlyle heard her in England and was thoroughly bored. “Lind seemed to me,” he wrote, “a very true, clear, genuine little creature, with a voice of extraordinary _extent_ and _little_ richness of tone; who sang, acted, etc., with consummate fidelity, but had unfortunately nothing but mere _non_-sense to sing or act; a defect not much felt by the audience, as would appear, but very heavily pressing upon me for one. ‘Depend upon it,’ said I to Fuz, ‘the Devil is busy _here_ to-night, wherever he may be idle!’--Old Wellington had come staggering in to attend the thing. Thackeray was there; d’Orsay, Lady Blessington,--to all of whom (Wellington excepted!) I had to be presented and grin some kind of foolery,--much against the grain. It was one o’clock when we got home; on the whole, I do not design to hear Lind again; it would not bring me sixpence worth of benefit, I think, to hear her sing six months in that kind of material.” She sang _La Somnambula_ when Carlyle heard her.