After many years of undimmed happiness and prosperity, changes take place, and by one of those extraordinary freaks of fortune by which the highest and the lowest reverse their positions, we find the Countess Rossi--the Sontag of our youth--compelled to have recourse to that profession of which she had been so immaculate an ornament, to retrieve a broken fortune and re-erect the altars of her home. No false scruples troubled her; she had a duty to perform, and she set herself with bold and hopeful spirit to the work. How entirely she has succeeded, her career for the two past years bears witness. A few more years of labor and her noble exertions will have procured for her a second large fortune. And how has time worked upon Sontag? To our mind it has but matured her glorious powers, and added to her loveliness a charm, which is doubled by our interest in and our sympathy for her present position. Her voice has still that exquisite purity and _spirituelle_ quality which make it a perfect luxury to listen. We have heard louder voices, but never one that fell so soothingly upon the heart--nor one that left us so perfectly satisfied while longing eagerly for more. She was always a thorough and conscientious _artiste_, and she has not changed. To describe her powers minutely would occupy too much space, but they are all summed up in one short sentence. Sontag _sings_! HOW SONTAG SINGS. BY HECTOR BERLIOZ. IN these days, when music has become one of the _necessities_ of civilized life, each party and each clique has its own particular favorite, and denies even common justice to those artists, who are not members of that _camaraderie_ which Mr. Scribe has so cleverly portrayed in his witty play. In that respect Madame Sontag has been extremely fortunate; criticism has handled her more tenderly, and she had to suffer less than any other singer from the venom of party spirit, from the simple reason, that she united all the qualities--although not in an equal degree--all like to find in an artist: sweetness never surpassed, agility almost fabulous, expression, and the most perfect intonation. On she carols, higher and higher, like a lark at "heaven's gate," so soft, so clear, so wonderfully distinct that, like the silver bell from the altar, it is heard through the pealing organ. But her principal merit, in our eyes, is the absence of 'rant'--the substitute of genius--in any shape whatever. She always SINGS, and does not depend on mere strength of lungs--erroneously called "power." She never strains her delicate organ--that sweet instrument so susceptible of every shade of expression. How fortunate for our young singers that, like the nuns in Meyerbeer's _Robert le Diable_, she left the tomb of the seven ancestors, bestowed by the King of Prussia upon the Countess de Rossi, to teach them the wide difference between singing and screaming, and to show how we all, during the last ten years, have been listening to and adoring _false_ prophets.