The moment Mademoiselle Sontag began to sing, all doubt--if there ever had been any, that I had really guessed the secret--vanished. It was the same purity of voice--the same charm of style and execution, which I had so much applauded, and which still echoed both in my ears and in my heart. But the voice of _this_ Sontag had more power, more firmness, more body. The higher notes are just as soft and just as clear--but they have more roundness; and the middle register is infinitely better. In a word, this artist unites the qualities of youth and freshness to all the talents of the experienced and finished artist. _Rode's variations_ were a series of vocal wonders. It was impossible to imagine that art or talent could reach so high; and after all, I think we must set it down to one of those prodigies which nature alone can create. SOUVENIRS OF THE OPERA IN EUROPE. BY JULIE DE MARGUERITTES. CHAP. I. THE opera was _Cenerentola_; the overture, chorus, introduction, &c., all were impatiently listened to. At length the scene opened and revealed _Cenerentola_ by her kitchen fire. She lays down her bellows, she advances; even in that assemblage of beauty she was the most beautiful. Her dress is simply a grey merino with a black velvet ribbon round the waist. She is exactly the height of the Medicean Venus, what the moderns call the middle height: her figure, though slight, has the full proportion of womanhood: her skin glows with the soft tint of the China rose; her arms and hands are faultless; her ankle, revealed by the short petticoat, that of the "Danatrice;" the foot, one for which the glass slipper would be too large. Who can describe her face? the soft, pouting lips of infancy, the delicate features, the large melting blue eye, the finely turned oval face, enshrined in a cloud of golden curls. So lovely was she that the audience appeared to forget that she was to do anything more than allow herself to be looked at. But she comes towards the footlights with the modest self-possession of an innocent child. "_Una olta c'era un re_," first reveals the sweet tone of her voice. From the first note to the last it is unmistakably a soprano. Her execution, as she advanced into the difficulties of the music, was perfectly supernatural; it resembled an instrument--no bird--but it was the perfection of the loveliest of all instruments, the human voice. With the purity of a silver bell, she reached to the E above the lines; it was perfectly equal, both in the upper and middle registers; it was sweet, soft, and expressive in all its tones. When the public recovered from the first effect, they were obliged to acknowledge that it was wonderful, pleasing, and charming, like the fair creature before them, moving gracefully through her part as she would have done in a drawing-room. _Cencrentola_ (like the _Barbiere_) is an opera which is sung by sopranos and by contraltos; it was originally written for Emilia