has little interest even for me, it is that I wish to distract my mind
from brooding over the question that interests 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