And in this vein, we can not avoid noting and commending the increasing love for flowers. Bouquets are marketable; they are getting upon the stalls; they flank the lamb and the butter. Our civilization is ripening into a sense of their uses and beauties. They talk to us even now—(for a tenpenny bunch of roses is smiling at us from our desk) of fields, fragrance, health, and wanton youth. They take us back to the days when with urchin fingers we grappled the butter-cup and the mountain daisy—days when we loitered by violet banks, and loved to loiter—days when we loved the violets, and loved to love; and they take us forward too—far forward to the days that always seem coming, when flowers shall bless us again, and be plucked again, and be loved again, and bloom around us, year after year; and bloom over us, year after year!
The two great hinges of public chat are—just now—the rival candidates, Generals Pierce and Scott; serving not only for the hot hours of lunch under the arches of the Merchants' Exchange, but toning the talk upon every up-bound steamer of the Hudson, and giving their creak to the breezes of Cape May.
Poor Generals!—that a long and a worthy life should come to such poor end as this. To be vilified in the journals, to be calumniated with dinner-table abuse, or with worse flattery—to have their religion, their morals, their courage, their temper, all brought to the question;—to have their faces fly-specked in every hot shop of a barber—to have their grandparents, and parents all served up in their old clothes; to have their school-boy pranks ferreted out, and every forgotten penny pitched into their eyes; to have their wine measured by the glass, and their tears by the tumbler; to have their names a bye-word, and their politics a reproach—this is the honor we show to these most worthy candidates!
As a relief to the wearisome political chat, our city has just now been blessed with Alboni; and it is not a little curious to observe how those critics who were coy of running riot about Jenny Lind, are lavishing their pent-up superlatives upon the new-comer. The odium of praising nothing, it appears, they do not desire; and seize the first opportunity to win a reputation for generosity. The truth is, we suspect, that Alboni is a highly cultivated singer, with a voice of southern sweetness, and with an air of most tempered pleasantness; but she hardly brings the prestige of that wide benevolence, noble action, and naïve courtesy, which made the world welcome Jenny as a woman, before she had risked a note.
In comparing the two as artists, we shall not venture an opinion; but we must confess to a strong liking for such specimen of humanity, as makes its humanity shine through whatever art it embraces. Such humanity sliding into song, slides through the song, and makes the song an echo; such humanity reveling in painting, makes the painting only a shadow on the wall. Every true artist should be greater than his art; or else it is the art that makes him great.
And while we are upon this matter of song, we take the liberty of suggesting, in behalf of plain-spoken, and simple-minded people, that musical criticism is nowadays arraying itself in a great brocade of words, of which the fustian only is clear to common readers. We can readily understand that the art of music, like other arts, should have its technicalities of expression; but we can not understand with what propriety those technicalities should be warped into such notices, as are written professedly for popular entertainment and instruction.
If, Messrs. Journalists, your musical critiques are intended solely for the eye of connoisseurs, stick to your shady Italian; but if they be intended for the enlightenment of such hungry outside readers, as want to know, in plain English, how such or such a concert went off, and in what peculiar way each artist excels, for Heaven's sake, give us a taste again of old fashioned Saxon expletive! He seems to us by far the greatest critic, who can carry to the public mind the clearest and the most accurate idea of what was sung, and of the way in which it was sung. It would seem, however, that we are greatly mistaken; and that the palm of excellence should lie with those, whose periods smack most of the green-room, and cover up opinions with a profusion of technicalities. We shall not linger here, however, lest we be attacked in language we can not understand.