Raphael, Bryant and Paganini, have illustrated this most emphatically. Jenny Lind seems to have kept her better feelings alive by the habitual exercise of benevolence, and a diffusive friendliness, while her concentrated and earnest activity finds utterance in her art. Hence the sway she has gained over countless hearts, each absorbed in its own dream or shadowed by its own regrets, that glow again in the kindling atmosphere of song, which gushes from a soul over which no overmastering passion has yet cast a gloom, and whose transparent waters no agitation of conflicting desires has ever made turbid and restless. Jenny Lind has been a priestess at the shrine of Art, and therefore interprets its oracles “as one having authority.” In this country the idea of fashion and the mere relish of amusement, have blended so exclusively with the support of the Opera, that we seldom realize its artistic relations and influence. The taste for the Italian Opera seems to have extended in the ratio of civilization; and although it is, after all, an exotic among the Anglo-Saxons—a pleasure born in the “sweet South,” and in its very richness of combination, suggestive of the impassioned feeling and habitual luxury of those climes—yet, on the other hand, it is typical of the complex life, wants and tendencies of modern society. The old English tragic drama, robust, fierce-hearted and unadorned, has faded before it; the theatre, as a reunion of wits, and an arena for marvelous histrionic effects, as a subject of elegant criticism, and a nucleus for universal sympathy, may be said not to exist; while the Opera has become the scene of display, elegance, and pleasure on the one hand, and of the highest triumphs on the other. The sentiment of the age has written itself in music—its wide intelligence, its keen analysis, its revolutionary spirit, its restlessness, and its humanity, may be traced in the rich and brilliant combinations of Rossini, in the grand symphonies of Beethoven, in the pleading tenderness of Bellini, and in the mingled war-notes and sentiment of Verdi. The demand for undisguised and free expression, characteristic of the times, finds also its requisite scope in the lyrical drama. Recitation is too tame, pantomime too silent, scenic art too illusive, costume too familiar, music too unpicturesque; but all these combined are, at once, as romantic, exciting, impressive, and melo-dramatic as the varied aptitudes, the exacting taste, and the broad, experimental genius of the age. The gifts of nature, the resources of art, the gratification of the senses, the exigencies of fashion and taste, and the wants of the heart and imagination find in the Opera a most convenient luxury. The lyrical drama has thus gradually usurped the place of tournament and theatre; it is a social as well as an artistic exponent of the day; and those who have best illustrated it are justly regarded as public benefactors. Few, however, have ministered