arted girl clinging to the church door. There is
a dungeon, the chanting of the procession of tonsured priests, the
passing-bell. Seldom appears the golden bridge over which the baffled
and tired pass into Valhalla.

Do we like this because it is life, or because there is a certain
satisfaction in seeing the tragedy which impends over all, pervades
the atmosphere, as it were, and adds something of zest to the mildest
enjoyment? Should we go away from the mimic stage any, better and
stronger if the drama began in the dungeon and ended on the greensward,
with innocent love and resplendent beauty in possession of the Rhine
gold?

How simple, after all, was the created world on the stage to the real
world in the auditorium, with its thousand complexities and dramatic
situations, and if the little knot of players of parts for an hour
could have had leisure to be spectators of the audience, what a deeper
revelation of life would they not have seen! For the world has never
assembled such an epitome of itself, in its passion for pleasure and its
passion for display, as in the modern opera, with its ranks and tiers
of votaries from the pit to the dome. I fancy that even Margaret, whose
love for music was genuine, was almost as much fascinated by the greater
spectacle as by the less.

It was a crowded night, for the opera was one that appealed to the
senses and stimulated them to activity, and left the mind free to pursue
its own schemes; in a word, orchestra and the scenes formed a sort of
accompaniment and interpreter to the private dramas in the boxes. The
opera was made for society, and not society for the opera. We occupied a
box in the second tier--the Morgans, Margaret, and my wife. Morgan said
that the glasses were raised to us from the parquet and leveled at us
from the loges because we were a country party, but he well enough knew
whose fresh beauty and enthusiastic young face it was that drew the fire
when the curtain fell on the first act, and there was for a moment a
little lull in the hum of conversation.

"I had heard," Morgan was saying, "that the opera was not acclimated in
New York; but it is nearly so. The audience do not jabber so loud nor
so incessantly as at San Carlo, and they do not hum the airs with the
singers--"

"Perhaps," said my wife, "that is because they do not know the airs."

"But they are getting on in cultivation, and learning how to assert the
social side of the opera, which is not to b