The newspapers of the day after the first concert were beside themselves, and the undiscriminating praise increased with the number of concerts. The _Herald_ in an effulgence of mixed metaphors wrote of Jenny Lind’s song, “which she spins out from her throat like the attenuated fiber from the silkworm, dying away so sweetly and so gradually, till it seems melting into the song of the seraphim and is lost in eternity.” After the first rehearsal, _The Spirit of the Times_ critic wrote: “As a bird just alighted upon a spray begins to sing, he knows not why, and pours forth the increasing volume of his voice from an instinct implanted within him by that Power which made him vocal,--as flowers unfold their petals to the air, as zephyrs breathe, as rivulets leave their founts, as thoughts flow, as affections rise, as feelings develop,--so this wondrous creature sang. It was not Art. It was a manifestation of Nature.” _The Spirit of the Times_ was not a comic paper. The _Herald_ remarked casually that Jenny Lind’s appearance in the old world was “as significant an event as the appearance of Dante, Tasso, Raphael, Shakespeare, Goethe, Thorwaldsen, or Michael Angelo.” “As a cantatrice,” continued the _Herald_ writer, “she is as much superior to all her northern predecessors as Napoleon was to his contemporaries, or as Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, was to the first ‘gemman ob color’ who used it. She has changed all men’s ideas of music as much so as Bacon’s inductive system revolutionized philosophy.” The _Herald_ sincerely believed that the advent of Jenny Lind was an indication that “the wand of civilization has fallen from the hands of the southern nations and passed to the hardy northern races.... All feel her power, all go mad who see her, and they cannot explain the secret of her influence.” Had the _Herald_ stopped in its abandon to analyze the depths of its own sentimentality, it might have had the secret of that influence. In his lofty peroration this inspired editorial writer sings that Jenny Lind has left “the effete monarchies of Europe” to sing as she confessed she never could sing in her former languishing environment to the great and free American democracy, where things never stand still. In all these criticisms there was little comment on her voice, as such. Those who did venture to criticize it found in it a certain coolness, which her champions called its purity, and a lack of ardor, which her worshipers commended as the absence of the common Latin display of disgraceful passion. But those who attempted to qualify their praise were overwhelmed by the recriminations against their judgment of those who were confirmed fanatics.