"But seriously, Thalberg and Vieuxtemps have never done us any harm that we know of, and we don't suppose they intend to. We wouldn't much mind hearing their music, for no doubt it is nearly, if not quite, as good as that of the average common run of Dutchmen, which, as the latter will tell you, is saying a good deal." And yet musical culture was said to be in its infancy in America at that time! In Boston, Vieuxtemps, after an absence of fourteen years, was criticised thus: "We cannot see in M. Vieuxtemps the spark of genius, but he is a complete musician, and the master of his instrument. Tone so rich, so pure, so admirably prolonged and nourished, so literally drawn from the instrument, we have scarcely heard before; nor such vigour, certainty, and precision, such nobility and truth in every motion and effect. We recognise the weakness for sterile difficulties of extreme harmonics." Vieuxtemps was also subject to comparison with Sivori, rather to the former's disparagement. "The one plays the violin like a great musician, the other like a spoiled child of nature, who has endowed him with the most precious gifts. Intrepid wrestlers, both, and masters of their instrument, they each employ a different manner. M. Vieuxtemps never lets you forget that he plays the violin, that the wonders of mechanism which he accomplishes under your eye are of the greatest difficulty and have cost him immense pains, whereas M. Sivori has the air of being ignorant that he holds in his hands one of the most complicated instruments that exists, and he sings to you like Malibran. He sings, he weeps, he laughs on the violin like a very demon." The following paragraph is a good sample of New York musical journalism in the year 1844: "Vieuxtemps's first concert on Monday night was a very stylish jam. He is a small, puny-built man, with gold rings in his ears, and a face of genteel ugliness, but touchingly lugubrious in its expression. With his violin at his shoulder, he has the air of a husband undergoing the nocturnal penance of walking the room with 'the child'--and performing it, too, with unaffected pity. He plays with the purest and coldest perfection of art, and is doubtless more learned on the violin than either of the rival performers [Ole Bull and Artot], but there is a vitreous clearness and precision in his notes that would make them more germane to the humour of before breakfast than to the warm abandon of vespertide. His sister travels with him (a pretty blonde, very unlike him), and accompanies him on the piano." Vieuxtemps also visited America in 1870, with the celebrated singer Christine Nilsson.