Yours most truly,
Fanny.
29, King Street, Thursday, 3d.
It is no longer the bitter cold morning on which you asked me how I was, and now I cannot for the life of me remember how or where I was on that said 26th. Oh, it was last Wednesday, and I was travelling from Lynn to Cambridge, and I was pretty well, and had a pleasant railroad trip, the gentlemen in the railroad carriage with me being intelligent and agreeable men, and one of them well acquainted with my brother John, and all his Cambridge contemporaries. Though it was cold, too, the sun shone, and threw long streaks of brightness across the fens of Lincolnshire, producing effects on the unfrequent and in themselves unpicturesque farm-houses, with their groups of wintry skeleton-trees exactly like those in the Dutch pictures, which are, for the most part, representations of just such landscapes.
MENDELSSOHN. Mitchell sent me yesterday a box at the French theatre for a morning performance of the "Antigone," with Mendelssohn's choruses. Previous to the performance of the Greek drama, they played, very inappropriately it seems to me, his music of the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the effect of it upon my nerves was such that, though screened by the curtain of the box, and my sobs drowned by the orchestra, I thought I should have been obliged to leave the theatre. It is the first time that I have heard a note of Mendelssohn's music since his death.
How thankful I am I did not attempt that reading at the Palace! What should I have done there, thus convulsed with pain and sorrow, in the midst of those strange people, and the courtly conventions of their condition! Oh, what a bitter, bitter loss to the world, and all who loved him, has been the death of that bright and amiable great genius!
The Greek play was given in the true Grecian fashion, and was interesting and curious as a spectacle. The French literal translation of the grand old tragedy seemed at once stilted and bald, and yet I perceived and felt through it the power of the ancient solemn Greek spell; and though strange and puppet-like in its outward form, I was impressed by its stern and tragic simplicity. It is, however, merely an archæological curiosity, chiefly interesting as a reproduction of the times to which it belongs. To modern spectators, unless they are poets or antiquarians, I should think it must be dull, and so I find it is considered, in spite of Mendelssohn's fine music, which, indeed, is so well allied in spirit to the old tragedy, that to most listeners I dare say it has something of the dreamy dreariness of the drama itself.
Mrs. Jameson was with me, and it was chiefly on her account that I did not give way to my impulse to leave the theatre.
Good-bye. God bless you, my dear.
Ever yours,