Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/324

 strong; under her dark arched eyebrows a pair of wondrous eyes that glowed and blazed in their deep sockets like two black suns; a finely chiseled nose with open, quivering nostrils; above an energetic chin a mouth severe in its lines, with slightly lowered corners, such as we may imagine the mouth of the tragic Muse. Her stature, sometimes seeming tall, sometimes little, very slender, but the attitude betraying elastic strength; a hand with fine tapering fingers of rare beauty; the whole apparition exciting in the beholder a sensation of astonishment and intense expectancy.

The applause ceasing, she began to speak. In deep tones the first sentences came forth, in tones so deep that they sounded as if rising from the innermost cavities of the chest, aye, from the very bowels of the earth. Was that the voice of a woman? Of this you felt certain—such a voice you had never heard, never a tone so hollow and yet so full and resonant, so phantomlike and yet so real. But this first surprise soon yielded to new and greater wonders. As her speech went on that voice, at first so deep and cavernous, began, in the changing play of feelings or passions, to rise and roll and bound and fly up and down the scale for an octave or two without the slightest effort or artificiality, like the notes of a musical instrument of apparently unlimited compass and endless variety of tone color. Where was now the stiffness of the Alexandrine verse? Where the tedious monotony of the forced rhymes? That marvelous voice and the effects it created on the listener can hardly be described without a seemingly extravagant resort to metaphor.

Now her speech would flow on with the placid purl of a pebbly meadow brook. Then it poured forth with the dashing vivacity of a mountain stream rushing and tumbling from rock to rock. But her passion aroused, how that voice heaved and