I find my sister's voice and singing very much improved, and exceedingly charming. She speaks always with warm regard of you, and remembers gratefully your kindness to her.
My dear Mrs. Jameson, it is a great disappointment to me that I cannot welcome you to my American home, and be to you that pleasant thing, an old friend in a foreign land. It appears to me that we shall have the singular ill-luck of passing each other on the sea; at least, if it is true that you return in the autumn.
Much as I had desired to see my own country again, my visit to it has had one effect which I certainly had not anticipated, and for which I am grateful: it has tended to reconcile me to my present situation in life, comparatively remote as it is from the best refinements of civilization and all the enjoyments of society.... The turmoil and dissipation of a London life, amusing as they are for a time, soon pall upon one, and I already feel, in my diminished relish for them, that I am growing old.
To live in the country in England!—that indeed would be happiness and pleasure; but we shall never desert America and the duties that belong to us there, and I should be the last person to desire that we should do so; and so I think henceforth England and I are "Paradises Lost" to each other,—and this is a very strange life; with which "wise saw," but not "modern instance," I will conclude, begging you to believe me,
Ever yours most truly,
F. A. B.
[Madame Pasta did return then to the stage, and her brilliant young rival, Grisi, was to her what the Giessbach would be to a great wave of the Atlantic. But, alas! she returned once more after that to the scene of her former triumphs in London; the power, majesty, and grace of her face, figure, and deportment all gone, her voice painfully impaired and untrue, her great art unable to remedy, in any degree, the failure of her natural powers.
She came as an agent and emissary of the political party of Italian liberty, to help the cause of their Italia Unita, and our people received her with affectionate respect, for the sake of what she had been; but she accepted their applause with melancholy gestures of disclaimer, and sorrowful head-shaking over her own decline. Those who had never heard or seen her before were inclined to laugh; those who had, did cry.
The latent expression of a face is a curious study for the physiognomist, and is sometimes strikingly at variance with that which is habitual, as well as with the general character of the features. That fine and accurate observer of the symptoms of humanity, George Eliot, gives her silly, commonplace, little second-heroine in "Adam Bede," Hester, a pathetic and sentimental expression, to which nothing in her mind or character corresponds, and which must have been an inheritance from some ancestress in whom such an expression had originated with a meaning.
Madame Pasta was not handsome, people of uneducated and unrefined taste might have called her plain; but she had that indescribable quality which painters value almost above all others—style, and a power and sweetness of expression, and a grandeur and grace of demeanor, that I have never seen surpassed. She was not handsome, certainly; but she was beautiful, and never, by any chance, looked common or vulgar.