After his December concerts in New York Ole Bull returned to Boston, where he gave several concerts, and revisited some of the New England towns. He then returned to New York, to give his last concert in that city for the season, at the Tabernacle, to an audience of 3500 people.
The criticisms from the papers of that date would be pronounced as extravagant as Mrs. Child’s letters, while her accounts are more vividly descriptive of the intense excitement which prevailed. Another quotation from her is therefore given—from the letter dated December 24, 1844:—
You ask me for my impressions of Ole Bull’s “Niagara.”
It is like asking an Æolian harp to tell what the great organ of Freyburg does. But since you are pleased to say that you value my impressions because they are always my own, and not another person’s—because they are spontaneous, disinterested, and genuine,—I will give you the tones as they breathed through my soul, without anxiety to have them pass for more than they are worth....
Grand as I thought “Niagara” when I first heard it, it opened upon me with increasing beauty when I heard it repeated. I then observed many exquisite and graceful touches, which were lost in the magnitude of the first impression. The multitudinous sounds are bewildering in their rich variety.
“The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep.”
“The whispering air
Sends inspiration from the rocky heights,
And dark recesses of the caverned rocks;
The little rills, and waters numberless,
Blend their notes with the loud streams.”
There is the pattering of water–drops, gurglings, twitterings, and little gushes of song.
“The leaves in myriads jump and spring,
As if, with pipes and music rare,
Some Robin Goodfellow were there,
And all the leaves, in festive glee,
Were dancing to the minstrelsy.”
It reminded me of a sentence in the “Noctes Ambrosianæ,” beautifully descriptive of its prevailing character: “It keeps up a bonnie wild musical sough, like that o’ swarming bees, spring–startled birds, and the voices of a hundred streams, some wimpling awa’ ower the Elysian meadows, and ithers roaring at a distance frae the clefts.”