g to pleasure;
scenes placid, pastoral, innocent; light-hearted love, the dance on the
green, the stately pageant in the sunlit streets, the court, the ball,
the mad splendor of life. And then love becomes passion, and passion
thwarted hurries on to sin, and sin lifts to the heights of the immortal,
sweetly smiling gods, and plunges to the depths of despair. In vain the
orchestra, the inevitable accompaniment of life, warns and pleads and
admonishes; calm has gone, and gayety has gone; there is no sweetness now
but in the wildness of surrender and of sacrifice. How sad are the
remembered strains that aforetime were incentives to love and promises of
happiness! Gloom settles upon the scene; Mephisto, the only radiant one,
flits across it, and mocks the poor broken-hearted 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