It is many years ago that the Easy Chair, making the grand tour, was in Dresden, and saw in the newspaper that Jenny Lind, then in the first fulness of her fame, would sing for four nights in Berlin. It was in the autumn, and loitering along the Elbe and through the Saxon Switzerland was a very fascinating prospect. But the chance of hearing the Swedish Nightingale was more alluring than the Bastei and the lovely view from Konigstein, and at once the order of travel was interrupted, and the Easy Chair arrived eagerly in Berlin. The Berlin of those days was still a city in which the student could live economically, and hear the lectures of great teachers upon the most reasonable terms. But the sole interest of the moment was the Northern singer, and upon reaching the hotel and making prompt inquiry, the Easy Chair learned that chairs for the Lind representations could be secured only at prices which were wholly unprecedented in the staid Hohenzollern capital. The exigency of the case, however, compelled the payment, and the Easy Chair devoted eighteen thaler, or nearly as many American dollars, to obtaining a seat to hear Jenny Lind for the first time. Never for such a sum was bought so rich a treasure of delightful and unfading recollections, always cheering and inspiring--an unwasting music which has murmured and echoed through a life. The scene was the Royal Opera-house. The audience was the finest society of the court; and even then the musical taste of Berlin, as if forecasting Wagner, used to sneer loftily at that of Vienna, where Flotow was about to produce "Martha," as a taste for _tanzmusik_. The opera was the "Sonnambula," and after the pretty opening choruses and dances, Amina came tripping to the front through the clustering villagers. She was an ideal peasant maiden, blooming and blithe and fair, of an indefinable simplicity and purity; the genuine peasant of the poetic world, not a fine lady of Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon playing at rustic artlessness. The voice and the singing were but the natural expression of that charming maidenhood. The full volume, the touching sweetness of tone, the exquisite warble, the amazing skill and the marvellous execution, with the perfect ease and repose of consummate art, and the essential womanliness of the whole impression, were indisputable and supreme. To a person sensitive to music and of a certain ardor of temperament there could be no higher pleasure of the kind. Every such person who heard Jenny Lind in her prime, from 1847 to 1852, whether in opera or concert, can recall no greater delight and satisfaction.