“Si, si, si, bravo!” echoed all the company; and the haughty and happy actress nodded all round with a radiant smile, and repeated, in her silver tones, “Grazie! cari amici! grazie!”
As the servants had been turned out, the removal of the first course was managed in pic-nic fashion; and when the fruit and fresh bottles of wine were set upon the table by the attachés, and younger gentlemen, the health of the Princess who honored them by her presence was proposed in that language, which, it seems to me, is more capable than all others of expressing affectionate and respectful devotion. All uncovered and stood up, and Grisi, with tears in her eyes, kissed the hand of her benefactress and friend, and drank her health in silence.
It is a polite and common accomplishment in Italy to improvise in verse, and the lady I speak of is well known among her immediate friends for a singular facility in this beautiful art. She reflected a moment or two with the moisture in her eyes, and then commenced, low and soft, a poem, of which it would be difficult, nay impossible, to convey, in English, an idea of its music and beauty. It took us back to Italy, to its heavenly climate, its glorious arts, its beauty and its ruins, and concluded with a line of which I remember the sentiment to have been, “out of Italy every land is exile!”
The glasses were raised as she ceased, and every one repeated after her, “Fuori d’Italia tutto e esilio!”
“Ma!” cried out the fat Lablache, holding up his glass of champagne, and looking through it with one eye, “siamo ben esiliati qua!” and with a word of drollery, the party recovered its gayer tone, and the humor and wit flowed on brilliantly as before.
The house had long been still, and the last carriage belonging to the company above stairs had rolled from the door, when Grisi suddenly remembered a bird that she had lately bought, of which she proceeded to give us a description that probably penetrated to every corner of the silent mansion. It was a mocking bird, that had been kept two years in the opera house, and between rehearsal and performance had learned parts of everything it had overheard. It was the property of the woman who took care of the wardrobes. Grisi had accidentally seen it, and immediately purchased it for two guineas. How much of embellishment there was in her imitations of her treasure I do not know; but certainly the whole power of her wondrous voice, passion, and knowledge of music, seemed drunk up at once in the wild, various, difficult, and rapid mixture of the capricious melody she undertook. First came, without the passage which it usually terminates, the long throat-down, gurgling, water-toned trill, in which Rubini (but for the bird and its mistress, it seemed to me,) would have been inimitable: then, right upon it, as if it were the beginning of a bar, and in the most unbreathing continuity, followed a brilliant passage from the Barber of Seville run into the passionate prayer of Anna Bolena in her madness, and followed by the air of “Suoni la tromba intrepida,” the tremendous duet in the Puritani, between Tamburini and Lablache. Up to the sky and down to the earth again—away with a note of the wildest gladness, and back upon a note of the most touching melancholy—if the bird but half equals the imitation of his mistress, he were worth the jewel in a sultan’s turban.
“Giulia!” “Giulietta!” “Giuliettina!” cried out one and another as she ceased, expressing in their Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had inspired by her incomparable execution.
The stillness of the house in the occasional pauses of conversation reminded the gay party, at last, that it was wearing late. The door was unlocked, and the half-dozen sleepy footmen hanging about the hall were dispatched for the cloaks and carriages; the drowsy porter was roused from his deep leathern dormeuse, and opened the door—and broad upon the street lay the cold gray light of a summer’s morning. I declined an offer to be set down by a friend’s cab, and strolled off to Hyde Park to surprise myself with a sunrise; balancing the silent rebuke in the fresh and healthy countenances of early laborers going to their toil, against the effervescence of a champagne hour which, since such come so rarely, may come, for me, with what untimeliness they please.
THE STREETS OF LONDON.
It has been said that “few men know how to take a walk.” In London it requires some experience to know where to take a walk. The taste of the perambulator, the hour of the day, and the season of the year, would each affect materially the decision of the question.