Wonderful to see; and sad, if you had eyes! Do but think of it. Cleopatra threw pearls into her drink, in mere waste; which was reckoned foolish of her. But here had the Modern Aristocracy of men brought the divinest of its Arts, heavenly Music itself; and piling all the upholsteries and ingenuities that other human art could do, had lighted them into a bonfire to illuminate an hour's flirtation of Singedelomme, Mahogany, and these Improper-Persons! Never in Nature had I seen such waste before. O Colletti, you whose inborn melody, once of kindred as I judged to 'the Melodies eternal,' might have valiantly weeded out this and the other false thing from the ways of men, and made a bit of God's creation more melodious--they have purchased you away from that; chained you to the wheel of Prince Mahogany's chariot, and here you make sport for a macassar Singedelomme and his Improper-Females past the prime of life! Wretched spiritual Nigger, oh, if you _had_ some genius, and were not a born Nigger with mere appetite for pumpkin, should you have endured such a lot? I lament for _you_, beyond all other expenses. Other expenses are light; you are the Cleopatra's pearl that should not have been flung into Mahogany's claret-cup. And Rossini, too, and Mozart, and Bellini--Oh Heavens, when I think that Music too is condemned to be mad and to burn herself, to this end, on such a funeral pile--your celestial Opera-house grows dark and infernal to me! Behind its glitter stalks the shadow of Eternal Death; through it too I look not 'up into the divine eye,' as Richter has it, 'but down into the bottomless eyesocket--not up toward God, Heaven, and the Throne of Truth, but too truly down toward Falsity, Vacuity, and the dwelling-place of Everlasting Despair.... Good sirs, surely I by no means expect the Opera will abolish itself this year or the next. But if you ask me, Why heroes are not born now, why heroisms are not done now? I will answer you, It is a world all calculated for strangling of heroisms. At every ingress into life, the genius of the world lies in wait for heroisms, and by seduction or compulsion unweariedly does its utmost to pervert them or extinguish them. Yes; to its Hells of sweating tailors, distressed needle-women, and the like, this Opera of yours is the appropriate Heaven! Of a truth, if you will read a Psalm of Asaph till you understand it, and then come hither and hear the Rossini-and-Coletti Psalm, you will find the ages have altered a good deal....