The union of such musical science—such thoroughly disciplined art with such artlessness and simplicity, is, perhaps, the crowning mystery of her genius. To know and to love are the conditions of triumph in all the exalted spheres of human labor; and in the musical drama, they have never been so admirably united. Her command of expression seems not so much the result of study as of inspiration; and there is about her a certain gentle elevation which stamps her to every eye, as one who is consecrated to a high service. Her ingenuous countenance, always enlivened by an active intelligence, might convey, at first, chiefly the idea of good-nature and cleverness in the English sense; but her carriage, voice, movements, and expression in the more affecting moments of a drama, give sympathetic assurance of what we must be excused for calling—a crystal soul. In all her characters she transports us, at once, away from the commonplace and the artificial, if not always into the domain of lofty idealism, into that more human and blissful domain of primal nature; and unhappy is the being who finds not the unconscious delight of childhood, or the dream of love momently renewed in that serene and unclouded air.
In accordance with this view of Jenny Lind’s characteristics, the enthusiasm she excited in England, is alluded to by the leading critics, as singularly honest. No musical artist, indeed, was ever so fitted to win Anglo-Saxon sympathies. She has the _morale_ of the North; and does not awaken the prejudice so common in Great Britain, and so truly described in Corinne, against the passionate temperament and tendency to extravagance that mark the children of the South. No candidate for public favor was ever so devoid of the ordinary means of attaining it. There is something absurd in making such a creature the mere nucleus of fashionable vanity, or the object of that namby-pamby criticism that busies itself with details of personal appearance and French terms of compliment. Jenny Lind is not beautiful; she does not take her audiences by storm; she exercises no intoxicating physical magnetism over their sensitive natures. She is not classic either in form or feature, or manner, or style of singing. Her loveliness as a woman, her power as an artist, her grace as a character, lies in expression; and that expression owes its variety and its enchantment to unaffected truth to nature, sentiment and the principles of art.