- heard her aunt sing was one night
after she was in bed (she sleeps in my room, where one does not lose a
note of the music below). When I went up, I found her wide awake, and
she started up in her bed, exclaiming, "Well, how many angels have you
got down there, I should like to know?"

I wrote thus much this morning, dear Harriet; this evening I have
another quiet season in which to resume my pen.... I have been obliged
to give up my dinner engagement for to-day, and I sat down by the
failing light of half-past seven o'clock to eat a cold dinner alone,
with a book in my hand: which combination of circumstances reminded me
so forcibly of my American home, that I could hardly make out whether I
was here or there.

So far yesterday, Thursday evening; it is now Friday morning. Adelaide
has gone out with Mary Anne Thackeray to buy cheap gowns at a bankrupt
shop in Regent Street; the piano is silent, and I can hear myself think,
and have some consciousness of what I am writing about....

Dearest Harriet, it is now Sunday morning; there is a most stupendous
row at the pianoforte, and, luckily, there is no more space in this
paper for my addled brains to testify to the effect of this musical
tempest. God bless you.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

CLARGES STREET, Wednesday, June 23rd, 1841.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,

You asked me some time ago some questions about Rachel, which I never
answered, in the first place because I had not seen her then, and since
I have seen her I have had other things I wanted to say. Everybody here
is now raving about her. I have only seen her once on the stage, and
heard her declaim at Stafford House, the morning of the concert for the
Poles. Her appearance is very striking: she is of a very good height;
too thin for beauty, but not for dignity or grace; her want of chest and
breadth indeed almost suggest a tendency to pulmonary disease, coupled
with her pallor and her youth (she is only just twenty). Her voice is
the most remarkable of her natural qualifications for her vocation,
being the deepest and most sonorous voice I ever heard from a woman's
lips: it wants brilliancy, variety, and tenderness; but it is like a
fine, deep-toned bell, and expresses admirably the passions in the
delineation of which she excels--scorn, hatred, revenge, vitriolic
irony, concentrated rage, seething