University of Virginia Library

A CAVATINA.

Not long since, there arrived in our city a pair
of the Lafayettes, who landed, washed, shaved,
bathed, ate, slept and departed, without so much
as starting from their ambush a single one of the
lion-hunters; with the exception of one or two riddling
shots from the small arms of the evening papers,
they escaped scot-free, and as unscathed as if
their father, the poor old marquis, had never buckled
on an epaulette for American Independence.
At Albany, indeed, I learn with regret, that they
were overtaken, and were honored with such a surfeit
of mud, Devons and Dorkings, as must have
satisfied both their rurality and their pride.

To their escape from our town, they are indebted
not so much to our generosity as to our Jenny Lind.
You, Fritz, will understand this;—for you have
listened to this songstress amid the blaze of kingly
attendance, and under the heavily embossed roof of

a Royal opera-house;—where the King and his
suite were nothing, and the fairest, `high-bosomed'
dames of the Unter den Linden were nothing,—and
where the long-moustached young officers of the
Prussian army twisted their German faces into all
shapes of delight. You will understand it, for you
have seen her add her native grace to the sweet
impersonation of the dreaming and wronged Sonnambula;
and you have seen her, with all the accessories
of brilliant stage decorations, and with all
the vitality of infectious dramatic skill, stretch up
those little hands to Heaven, in all the fervor and
the strength of a song of prayer.

Seeing her thus in the old world, where at every
sunset martial music swelled upon the air, with its
tale of monarchic splendor, and of monarchic power,—it
is pleasant to see her here, quit for a time of
the panoply of the stage, and in no character but
that which she best adorns, viz., her own,—lending
her sweet voice and songs to the clear atmosphere
of our land of freedom.

Nor could our songstress easily find a more glorious
singing-spot than that upon the edge of our
moon-lighted bay—wide as the gulf by Sorentum,
and with a richer green upon the shore—soft as
the Lagoons of Venice, and wakened with the
charm of a freer and happier life.

Had Jenny been less than she was represented,
either in tone or in heart, there might before this
have been a strong reaction. But from the first,
she has more than sustained her character; and
with a most liberal hand, she has showered back
the first largess of the town, to run like the golden
currents of her song in a thousand channels, carrying
gladness and joy with their sparkle.

It is a new feeling with which to worship art—
that of doing goodness by the worship. The knowledge
of the abounding benevolence and liberality
of this high priestess of song, makes our offerings
seem like the sweet sacrifices of old to some protecting
goddess, or like that Christian munificence
which made the wise men of the East prodigal
of their frankincense and myrrh.

Jenny Lind is reported to be appropriating her
earnings in this country to the establishment of a
great Swedish school; it can well be believed; her
charity and good sense lend evidence to the report.
Let me set the matter down for you, more narrowly;—a
young woman, not yet thirty, scarce appearing
two and twenty, with whom the enthusiasm
of youth has not yielded one jot to the approaches
of age,—while yet in the hey-day of life,
when worldly vanities take strongest hold of the
soul, and under an amount of blandishment and

flattery that might overcome the staid virtues of a
veteran, is bestowing her honors on the needy, and
the triumphs of her art and study upon the orphan,
and the poor. It is as if Raphael had painted always
to teach lessons of charity, or Byron made
verse for the endowment of hospitals.

I love, I must say, Fritz, the very exuberance of
admiration which waits upon such charity. It is
pleasant, amid the cynical things which are credited
me, to give loose to such enthusiasm as five
and fifty years can yet keep within the walls of
manhood, and add the applause of a Timon to the
plaudits of the multitude. God save me from that
respectable class who cherish their impassive habit
under all the events of life, and who cling to their
coldness as the only security of their dignity!

You surely will not set me down as an echoer of
the praises of others, or as one given to the loose
carriage of indiscriminate flattery. My letters, one
and all, have told you a different story:—nay, they
will have even made you question the heartiness
which you recognized in the days gone by,—when
we mingled our struggles and our hopes upon the
brink of youth, as the tide set outward, and
leaped together into the stream that led on to life
and destiny. But now, with the memory of those
notes of the songstress—not in my ear, but in my

soul—flowing over me like pleasant thoughts heaven-ward
bound, and heaven-belonging,—now falling
to an echo, sweet as the sweetest memories of
childhood, and again rising and swelling, pure and
high as the best hopes that beckon us toward futurity,—I
fall from my office of critic, carpist, or
whatever you may term me, and yield as profound
an homage as any, to that art which, though it
runs before the foremost, is yet sublimed to a still
higher pitch by its abounding charity.

There is something more than interesting in the
thought that a lady songstress, of foreign birth, is
gathering by her melodies, from Americans of every
class and every taste, the means to build up her
distant country of the North in the harmonies and
duties of civilization. Think of it for a moment,
Fritz, that your ticket, and your seat, is to give a
desk to some poor Swedish scholar; and that the
echoes of the Nightingale (sounds to be kissed) are
to re-echo through their whole life-time, in the
hearts and voices of ten thousand blue-eyed Scandinavian
children!

There is a kind of moral sublimity in the thought,
that the inhabitants of our Western World are led
on by their sympathetic appreciation of the highest
art, and by their offerings at its shrine, to extend
the means of cultivation and of refinement to the

people of that mountain peninsula, over which
reigned the great Gustavus Vasa, when America
was a wilderness, and this Castle Garden a low alluvial
debris, on which the herons stalked among
the rank sea grass, and half-clad heathen stranded
their birch canoes.

The fashionable world, the papers tell us, has
held aloof, and has only here and there sprinkled
the benches of the Castle; if so, fashionable people
are to be pitied—not so much for their weakness
as for their losses. I am inclined to think that the
fashionable world is slandered by the report. Were
Jenny less than Jenny; were the sympathies she
excites less universal, or her vanities more in keeping
with the proper vanities of the town, we should
long ago have lost her naïveté in the splendor of
parade, and our fashionists would have been intoxicated
by her reception of their favors. But even
the idlest, and the strongest of our fashionable
world, are not apt in the offices of self-denial; and
though they are not remarkable for their deeds of
benevolence, yet they will not cheat themselves of
a song that beguiles their ennui, though the price
they pay is a reluctant charity. What a lesson is
given by this benevolent Swedish woman, to our
silken drivers of showy equipage, and to our fat
dandlers of poodle dogs!

How many of our richly-reared women, between
twenty and thirty, have got an ear or eye for outcast,
needy children, or for the groans and sufferings
of the poor? How many of them are in the
habit of commuting their necklaces or their opera
fans into bread for the destitute? How many of
them keep the calendar of our schools by charity,
and do their offices of kindness—for a blessing?
There are indeed honorable exceptions, whom it
would please my fancy to designate;—they find
their reward in the glow of an honest purpose.

With the most of them (it is hard to say it, Fritz,)
this town life is but a round of delirious indulgences,
in which the delights afforded even by this new
meteor of song, are only—an added excitement.
Bounty and duty are to them unknown terms, just
fitted for pulpit talk, but very harsh in the boudoir.
Their sensibilities are kept for the dreamy rhapsodies
of elegantly-bound poets, or for the sweet
covers of their prayer-books. Their charity all
exudes in a twilight tear; and all their religion in
a Lentan fast.

You will perhaps set me down, Fritz, as one
crazed by the reigning excitement, and as giving
loose to a frenzied intoxication of spirit; but I
claim no absolution from that sympathy, which is
started by the holy offices of charity, and adorned

by the natural graces of simplicity and song. I do
not envy the critic, who must listen with professional
coldness to such a singer, and curb his admiration
by the music-master's scale. Even the
elegant journalism which talks of her bravuras, her
andantes, and falsettos, is to me a Crispin criticism
upon a Phidian statue.

Jenny's andante is an allegro of spirit; she
cultivates no catch-penny bravuras of voice, though
her whole action is a bravura of soul. Her life,
like her voice, is of one register; and her actions,
like her tones, whether di testa or di petto, have
always that peculiar and holy symphony of utterance
which makes them integral and alone.

There are those who object, that Jenny's voice
brings no tears, and that her style is cold. They
prefer the heated utterance of the Southron. Every
man will have his taste; but for myself, Fritz, I
had rather see the heat of the soul in deeds, than
to take my knowledge of it from the lip. And with
Jenny's warmth in the world, and toward the world,
she can well afford to spend her voice in cool showers
of refreshing and limpid sound, rather than in the
heated outbursts of sultry, electric clouds. The
tears she makes, are the tears of gratitude; and
the smiles she calls, are the smiles of wonder and
of joy.

I must confess that I have enough of the Saxon
blood tingling in these finger ends, to welcome, as
a northern cousin, the pure, bright genius of the
Swedish mountains and pine-lands, who is chaste
and pure as the auroral lights;—nor do I regret one
whit, that she does not bring in her breath the heat
of the simoon, or show in her style the yellow intensity
of the tropics. Her song is fresh, genial,
sympathetic; and though it does not welter and
writhe like a swollen and turbid mediterranean
river, it rolls on, pure and clear, like a rill through
heather, or dashes like a mountain stream, watering
bountifully wide meadows, and making whole
hillsides green.

The Grisi has her richness of song, flowing smoothly
and evenly as oil; but Jenny's notes are like the
dashing sparkle of spring water. The first may
feed, with its combustible material, the fires that
are seething in one's bosom; but the cool, joyous,
and limpid brightness of the other will feed the
health and temper of the whole man.

I propose no quarrel with the critics; they are a
captious set; and a quiet gentleman must needs be
much disturbed, if not worsted, by an encounter.
But in this matter of objecting to the town favorite,
her northern style, and her lack of that impassioned
dramatism of musical sentiment, which belongs to

the Italian, it seems to me that the critics are as
idle, and meaningless, as if they were to object to
the blue of her eye, or to the golden shadows that
lie parted over her forehead.

She is there—the large-souled woman, with not
one affectation of the stage, or one mimicry of
feeling;—only Jenny—as the God who made the
people of the pine-lands, as well as the people of
the olives, fashioned her; and if the amateurs can
mend her—they may.

I wish, Fritz, from my heart, that for an hour I
could get at one of your forest skirts, to gather a
bunch of wild-flowers,—with the golden rod in it,
and a fragrant orchis, and a blue daisy, and pale
ghost-flower, set off with the heavy fringe of a
brake, and the feathery lightness of the maiden's
hair,—to make up a bouquet for the songstress. And
I am sure that such a bunch of wild flowers would
touch Jenny's heart more nearly, than all the
flaunting blossoms from our green-houses of quality.

Act upon the hint, my dear fellow, and tie one
with your own hands, with the ribbon grass that
grows in your meadow; send it me at once, and it
shall be braided into a thyrsan garland, to hide the
point of my Timon raillery, and to be laid down,
with all the grace that years have vouchsafed to
me, at the feet of the blue-eyed Jenny.