At the end of a long, kind letter I received from you this morning, dearest Harriet, there is a most sudden and incomprehensible sentence, an incoherent, combined malediction upon yourself and your dog Bevis, which I found it difficult to connect in any way with the matter which preceded it, which was very good advice to me, abruptly terminating in a declaration that you were a fool and your dog Bevis a brute, and leaving me to conclude either that he had overturned your inkstand or that you had gone mad, though indeed your two propositions are sane enough: for the first I would contradict if I could; the second I could not if I would; and so, as the Italians say, "Sono rimasta." ...

With regard to the likeness between my sister and myself, it is as great as our unlikeness.... Our mode of perceiving and being affected by things and people is often identical, and our impressions frequently so similar and so simultaneous that we both often utter precisely the same words upon a subject, so that it might seem as if one of us might save the other the trouble of speaking.... She is a thousand times quicker, keener, finer, shrewder, and sweeter than I am, and all my mental processes, compared with hers, are slow, coarse, and clumsy.

MERCADANTE'S OPERA. Here my letter broke off yesterday morning, and yesterday evening I went to see the new opera, so that I shall have realities instead of speculations to treat you to. [The opera was an English version of the "Elena da Feltre," by Mercadante, whose dramatic compositions, "La Vestale," "Le Due Illustre Rivale," the "Elena da Feltre," and others, obtained a very considerable temporary popularity in Italy, but were, I think, little known elsewhere. They were not first-rate musical productions, but had a good deal of agreeable, though not very original, melody, and were favorable to a declamatory, passionate style of singing, having a great deal of dramatic power and pathos. My sister was fond of them, and gave them with great effect, and the celebrated prima donna, Madame Ungher, achieved great popularity and excited immense enthusiasm in some of them.]

The opera was entirely successful, owing certainly to Adelaide, for the music is not agreeable, or of an order to become popular; the story is rather involved, which, however, as people have books to help them to it, does not so much matter. She was beautifully and becomingly dressed in mediæval Italian costume, and looked very handsome. Her voice was, as usual, very much affected by her nervousness, and comparatively feeble; this, however, signifies little, as it is only on the first night that it occurs, and every succeeding representation, her anxiety being less, she recovers more power of voice.

She acted extremely well, so as again to excite in me the strongest desire to see her in an acting part; a desire which is only qualified by the consideration that she makes more money at present as a singer than she probably could as an actress. At the end of the piece she died, with one of those expressions of feeling the effect of which may, without exaggeration, be called electrifying: it made me spring on my seat, and the whole audience responded with that voice of human sympathy that any true representation of feeling elicits instantaneously. Having renounced her lover, and married a man she hated, to save her father's life, after seeing her lover go to church and be married to another woman, her father being nevertheless executed (an old story, no doubt, but that's no matter), she loses her senses and stabs herself, and as she falls into the arms of her husband (the man she hated) she sees her lover, who just arrives at this moment, and the dying spring which she made, with her arms stretched towards him, falling, before she reached him, dead on the ground, was one of those terrible and touching things which the stage only can reproduce from nature—I mean, out of reality itself—a thing that of course neither painting nor sculpture could attempt, and that would have been comparatively cold and ineffective even in poetry, but which "in action" was indescribably pathetic. It had been, like many happy dramatic effects, a sudden thought with her, for it had only occurred to her yesterday morning; but the grace of the action, its beauty, truth, and expressiveness, are not to be conveyed by words. You will see it; not that, indeed, it may ever again be so very happy a thing in its effect....

God bless you, dear Harriet. Good-bye.

Ever yours,

Fanny.

Harley Street, January 31st, 1842.

My dearest Harriet,