great deal of dramatic power and pathos. My sister was
fond of them, and gave them with great effect, and the celebrated _prima
donna_, Madame Ungher, achieved great popularity and excited immense
enthusiasm in some of them.]

The opera was entirely successful, owing certainly to Adelaide, for the
music is not agreeable, or of an order to become popular; the story is
rather involved, which, however, as people have books to help them to
it, does not so much matter. She was beautifully and becomingly dressed
in mediaeval Italian costume, and looked very handsome. Her voice was, as
usual, very much affected by her nervousness, and comparatively feeble;
this, however, signifies little, as it is only on the first night that
it occurs, and every succeeding representation, her anxiety being less,
she recovers more power of voice.

She acted extremely well, so as again to excite in me the strongest
desire to see her in an _acting_ part; a desire which is only qualified
by the consideration that she makes more money at present as a singer
than she probably could as an actress. At the end of the piece she
_died_, with one of those expressions of feeling the effect of which
may, without exaggeration, be called electrifying: it made me spring on
my seat, and the whole audience responded with that voice of human
sympathy that any true representation of feeling elicits
instantaneously. Having renounced her lover, and married a man she
hated, to save her father's life, after seeing her lover go to church
and be married to another woman, her father being nevertheless executed
(an old story, no doubt, but that's no matter), she loses her senses
and stabs herself, and as she falls into the arms of her husband (the
man she hated) she sees her lover, who just arrives at this moment, and
the dying spring which she made, with her arms stretched towards him,
falling, before she reached him, dead on the ground, was one of those
terrible and touching things which the stage only can reproduce from
nature--I mean, out of reality itself--a thing that of course neither
painting nor sculpture could attempt, and that would have been
comparatively cold and ineffective even in poetry, but which "in action"
was indescribably pathetic. It had been, like many happy dramatic
effects, a sudden thought with her, for it had only occurred to her
yesterday morning; but the grace of the action, its beauty, truth, and
expressiveness, are not to be conveyed by wo