s me.

I think my father's selecting Paris for the first trial of my sister's
abilities a mistake; and I am very, _very_ anxious about the result.

Natural talent is sufficient for a certain degree of success in acting,
but not in singing, where the expression of feeling, the dramatic
portion of the performance, is so severely trammeled by mechanical
difficulties: the execution of which is all but rendered impossible by
the slightest trepidation, the tone of the voice itself being often
fatally affected by the loss of self-possession.

Pasta and Malibran both failed _at first_ in Paris, and I confess I
shall be most painfully anxious till I hear the issue of this
experiment....

I am in the garden from morning till night, but am too impatient for
mortal roots and branches. I should have loved the sort of planting
described in Tieck's "Elves," where they stamp a pine-cone into the
earth, and presently a fir-tree springs up, and, rising towards the sky
with the happy children who plant it, rocks them on its topmost
branches, to and fro in the red sunset.

Good-bye, God bless you.

I am ever your affectionate,
F. A. B.

[Many years after these letters were written, in 1845, when I
joined my sister in Rome, I found her living in the most cordial
intimacy with the admirable woman whose acquaintance I had coveted
for her and for myself.

My year's residence in Rome gave me frequent opportunities of
familiar intercourse with Mrs. Somerville, whose European celebrity,
the result of her successful devotion to the highest scientific
studies, enhanced the charm of her domestic virtues, her tender
womanly character, and perfect modesty and simplicity of manner.

During my last visit to Rome, in 1873, speaking to the old blind
Duke of Sermoneta, of my desire to go to Naples to pay my respects
to Mrs. Somerville, who was then residing there, at an extremely
advanced age, he said, "Elle est si bonne, si savante, et si
charmante, que la mort n'ose point la toucher." I was unable to
carry out my plan of going to Naples, and Mrs. Somerville did not
long survive the period at which I had hoped to have visited her.

Early in our acquaintance I had expressed some curiosity, not
unmixed with dread, upon the subject of scorpions, never having seen
one. Mrs. Somerv