Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/69

Rh "My first impression of her," said Emily, "was very striking; it was at an evening concert, which, like many others—when some three-drawing-roomed lady enacts patroness, and throws open her house for the sake of tickets, strangers, and a paragraph—was rather dimly lighted. Malibran was seated in an open window, round which some creeping plant hung in profuse luxuriance; the back-ground was a sky of the deepest blue and clearest moonlight—so that her figure was thrown out in strong relief. Her hair was just bound round her head, with a blue wreath quite at the back, as in some of the antique figures of the nymphs, who seem to have wreathed the flowers they had gathered. She was pale, and her large dark eyes filled with that lustrous gaze of absorbed attention only given to music. I thought, what a lovely picture she would have made!" But here a song commenced; and the silence enforced by a schoolmistress was not stricter than that Lord E. held it a duty to observe during singing. By the bye, both in print and parlance, how much nonsense is set forth touching "the English having no soul for music!" The love of music, like a continent, may be divided into