From the Easy Chair, Volume 1Curtis, George William
General
From the Easy Chair, Volume 1
Curtis, George William
American essays
Indeed, it was in these characteristic Northern songs, full of strange
and romantic tenderness, and suggestive of solitary seas and wide,
lonely horizons, of awful mountain heights and secluded valleys of
sober and sequestered life, that her voice seemed most extraordinary
and her skill most marvellous. Romantic singing, picturesque,
mournful, weird, could go no further. She was the spirit of the North
singing its hymn, and the audience sat enchanted under the melodious
spell. A veteran, as he recalls those days, might well suspect that he
is still enthralled by the magician's wand of youth, and that it is
not fact, but only its rosy exaggeration, which he describes. But the
contemporary records of that astonishing career remain, and they
confirm his story. The prices paid for tickets, the enormous receipts,
and the generous gifts in charity of Jenny Lind are not fables. Yet
the glamour of youth has its part in all recollection of the days of
splendor in the flower. Once when the Easy Chair was extolling the
melodious Swede to a senior, the hearer listened patiently, with a
remote look in his eyes, and replied at last, musingly, "Yes, but you
should have heard Malibran."
The series of American concerts which began on the 11th of September,
1850, at Castle Garden ended at the same place on the 24th of May,
1852. The vast space was not well suited for singing, but the
magnificent voice filled it completely, and in the fascinated silence
of the immense throng every exquisite note of the singer was heard.
She sang with evident feeling, and with responsive tenderness the
audience listened. Every time that she appeared she carried a fresh
bouquet, the sight of which gladdened some ardent young heart. But
when at last she came forward to sing the farewell to America, for
which Goldschmidt had composed the music, she bore in her hand a
bouquet of white rose-buds, with a Maltese cross of deep carnations in
the centre. This she held while for the last time in public she sang
in America; and the young traveller who, five years before, had turned
aside at Dresden to hear Jenny Lind in Berlin, alone in all that great
audience at Castle Garden knew who had sent those flowers.
THE TOWN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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