How he was moved by the few bars with which Norma interrupts Adalgisa's confessions, bars devoted to recollections of other days, to the magic which had once enthralled her also! And to what passion was she urged by the Roman's discovered faithlessness! With grandeur of mind she walked to the self-sacrifice! An actress who could personate a life so full of soul must possess it herself. If the composer's music nowhere gives the dramatic power of the story with equally overwhelming force, if it soon, as if alarmed at such daring, only wreathed the power with arabesques in which the self-conceited play of notes rocks itself to and fro, the vivacity of the representation in this case perfected the want of creative power on the composer's part, and held all intellects bound in the spell of the tragic grandeur! She was a _principessa_ in the kingdom of art, and was that not something much loftier than if her ancestors had stood proudly in the golden book of Venice? Filled with such feelings and thoughts, Blanden joined vigorously in the outbursts of applause with which the _finale_ of the performance was distinguished; yes, in the _entr'acte_ he had bought the last bouquet of the flower-girl, and thrown it to the triumphant actress. She took it up indifferently amongst the others; she did not know from whom it came. Had she yesterday cast the flowers into the water so as to bury all recollections? Here they returned again as the first greeting of a newly awakening love! Yet she in that bouquet perceived but one of those evidences of homage which were lavished so numerously upon her art! Not long afterwards Blanden was sitting with Professor Reising, Dr. Kuhl and Schöner in the comfortable cellar of the Court of Criminal Justice. Reising was in a good temper; he had shaken off his female retinue; the four sisters had been invited to a tea-party after the theatre. "Italian music," said Reising, "that is true music! How much Hegel was delighted with the starring tours of those Italian voices in Vienna! Music, like every art, must be the one object; the kingdom of notes has its own action and splendour; the opera singers must sing like nightingales and rejoice in the presumptuousness of song in those ascending and descending runs, in those stirring trills, in those sharp, foaming pearls of self-sufficing capriccios. Who would enquire whether that music is always adapted to the _libretto_? The story is a necessary evil; it is the perch in the cage, because the bird must sit somewhere.