PAST AND PRESENT. BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER. SONTAG! A thousand delightful memories are associated with that name;--memories which it is ever pleasant to recall. Years, years ago we heard her delicious voice, and its beauty never left us. We were present at the few last performances of Sontag before she retired from a world that almost worshipped her, to the joys and honors of private life. We heard her, and we thought that nature had never before endowed a human soul with such exquisite musical organization, or a voice in which heart and melody were so beautifully and intimately blended. We were young then, and our admiration of the beautiful in art was, perhaps, stronger than our judgment; for, in youth, enthusiasm is but rarely under the control of reason; and in good truth the beauty of Mademoiselle Henriette Sontag was something so _spirituelle_, seemingly, to us, so far elevated above common mortality, that reason was the slave of sensation--a double entrancement of the eye and the ear. The last part that we saw her in was _Agathe_ in _Der Freyschutz_. Her singing of the _Grand Aria_ was something perfectly unique, different in conception and execution from any artiste who had preceded her in that celebrated _scena_. It was a combination of purity and innocence, with earnest and holy love. The conception was full of dramatic force, and the execution was nature without exaggeration or counterfeit. In the _Andante_, which is a prayer for the safety of her lover, her impassioned, but innocent heartfelt earnestness, was as though a seraph was pleading for an erring mortal. We have seen nor heard anything like it since: it will be to us a life-long memory of delight. We remember well how loud, indignant, and regretful were the universal exclamations at the presumption of any one man appropriating to himself one in whom the whole civilized world held so dear an interest. But the fiat had gone forth; Love pleaded and Hymen sanctioned the engagement; the world looked on wonderingly, scarcely realizing the extent of the loss. The star that but yesterday beamed in all its radiant effulgence, had suddenly set, and would appear no more. And so Sontag disappeared; a blaze of glory circling that young brow, o'er which scarce twenty summers had set their seal. She disappeared, and by and by a new star arose, and the many worshipped, and the past was, if not forgotten, but rarely remembered. From time to time, however, the court gossips and the telltales of fashionable life vouchsafed us slight glimpses of the private life of the Countess Rossi--the peerless Sontag. Beloved and admired in that high circle to which her husband's position had called her, it was a theme of general remark with what modest womanly dignity she ornamented the society in which she moved. That same truthful earnestness which, aided by her supernatural gifts, rendered her the idol of the stage, secured her the love and esteem of all who met her in private life.