I can well remember how all London went mad over her in the _Figlia del Reggimento_, when she reached the zenith of her fame. In later years, when she was a woman of about forty, I used to meet her and her husband at the house of a friend. She was a tallish, stately, typical Swedish woman, with a wealth of fair hair, no special beauty of feature, but an expression and above all a smile that were of angelic goodness. The voice was still crystal-clear, true and sweet; even the highest notes—and heaven knows what altitudes she reached!—were as soft and caressing as those of the middle register. In my friend’s little drawing-room, with perhaps half a dozen people present, all sympathetic, Goldsmid would sit down at the piano, and she would pour out her soul, like the “Swedish Nightingale” that she was, in liquid music, shedding around her a happiness which she herself surely felt. Those little modest dinners were feasts indeed. Later on in these sketches I hope to have a good deal to say about Thomas Carlyle, but one conversation that I had with him seems to fit in so well here that I feel inclined to take it out of its turn. It is strange that he, who could so cruelly scourge the opera as he did in the “Keepsake” for 1852,[33] should have spoken, with all the rugged enthusiasm that was in him, both of Jenny Lind and Grisi. I forget how the subject cropped up, but he went off at score, contrasting the two: “The burning, passionate nature of the fiery Southern woman with the calm, cold temperament of the Northern singer”—those were his very words. Of the two I think that, Scot though he was, the fire of the South appealed to him more than the snows of the North. He preached on for several minutes, giving due meed of praise to both the great singers, but always with a tilt of the scale in favour of Grisi. Then from the opera he passed on to the stage, and there he recognized one figure above all others. He told me how he had seen Talma act in Paris—how great he was—how far ahead of all other actors. What appealed to him strongly was the statuesque side of the famous player’s genius, how completely he looked the part he was acting, especially in the old classical tragedies. “That man could so drape himself in a toga that you just felt that you had one of the ancient Romans before you.” When Carlyle spoke it was with the fire that he admired in “the Southern woman.” Ecclefechan could vie with Palermo. The lava of his volcanic talk swept all before it. I should have liked to have got him to speak of former lights of the English stage—the Kembles, the elder Kean and others. But it was of no use trying to stop him when once he had started. As easily might you hold the waters of Lodore with a butterfly-net. It was Jenny Lind, Grisi, Talma—nothing else.