On Thursday night my girls and I had the indescribable delight of seeing Jenny Lind in the Sonnambula. You will conceive better than I can tell you the wonderful effect of that gifted creature as a whole: for the grace, elasticity, modulation, roundness, fulness, continued life and animation, of her bodily movements and of her voice, go together, and seem the result of one impulse. Not an atom of beauty—and yet ‘the mind whose softness harmonised the whole ’—the effect of grace and unceasing suitableness, making the whole appearance beautiful. But all words are flat that would describe such a union of exquisite high-finished representation of feeling, with the most perfect modesty of deportment, one must rather try by negations to separate the idea of her from that of any actress ever seen. She had not a single gesture or posture of the common stage-sort, and the flow of action was as original as the flow of voice. The long-sustained, ever- varied, piano-passages—in which the softest, lowest tone was as distinct as the sharpest and loudest: the long-continued, rich, soft, piano-shake, followed by a long swelling note, without any appearance of taking breath— in short, the whole of her singing was song, without any admixture or imitation of instruments. I should think hers the perfection of the ‘voce di petto ’—almost without recurrence to falsetto. Her sleep-walking—gliding like a ghost, scarcely seeming to lift a foot, moving along a high beam over a mill-wheel, and descending steep steps; sinking on her knees, and rising again, all in a manner forming a complete contrast to her light, elastic, continually lively motions in wakefulness—showed the same extraordinary command over powers of body, as her sonnambule-singing over voice. One never heard anybody sing when walking in their sleep, but one feels her unearthly tone to be the right one. << less