terests me most, and on which I
most need your counsel. I will try to approach it in my next.

ISAURA.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Eulalie, Eulalie!--What mocking spirit has been permitted in this modern
age of ours to place in the heart of woman the ambition which is the
prerogative of men? You indeed, so richly endowed with a man's genius,
have a right to man's aspirations. But what can justify such ambition in
me? Nothing but this one unintellectual perishable gift of a voice that
does but please in uttering the thoughts of others. Doubtless I could
make a name familiar for its brief time to the talk of Europe,--a name,
what name? a singer's name. Once I thought that name a glory. Shall I
ever forget the day when you first shone upon me; when, emerging from
childhood as from a dim and solitary bypath, I stood forlorn on the
great thoroughfare of life, and all the prospects before me stretched
sad in mists and in rain? You beamed on me then as the sun coming out
from the cloud and changing the face of earth; you opened to my sight
the fairy-land of poetry and art; you took me by the hand and said,
"Courage! there is at each step some green gap in the hedgerows, some,
soft escape from the stony thoroughfare. Beside the real life expands
the ideal life to those who seek it. Droop not, seek it: the ideal life
has its sorrows, but it never admits despair; as on the ear of him who
follows the winding course of a stream, the stream ever varies the note
of its music,--now loud with the rush of the falls; now low and calm as
it glides by the level marge of smooth banks; now sighing through the
stir of the reeds; now babbling with a fretful joy as some sudden curve
on the shore stays its flight among gleaming pebbles,--so to the soul of
the artist is the voice of the art ever fleeting beside and before him.
Nature gave thee the bird's gift of song: raise the gift into art, and
make the art thy companion.

"Art and Hope were twin-born, and they die together." See how faithfully
I remember, methinks, your very words. But the magic of the words, which
I then but dimly understood, was in your smile and in your eye, and the
queen-like wave of your hand as if beckoning to a world which lay before
you, visible and familiar as your native land. And how devotedly, with
what earnestness of passion, I gave myself up to the task of raising my
gift into an art! I thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else;