all other women are earning their living, I trust it will no longer be considered derogatory for a "lady" to sing or play for money. If God creates an exceptional voice for the joy of multitudes, what is to be said of the conventionality that confines the magnificent tones to the limits of a fashionable drawing-room? I knew a glorious song-bird, that, from the farthest heights of the musical empyrean, might have ravished a listening world. She floods her gilded cage with melody; but does it fill her yearning heart? Still she is but a slave where she might have been a queen.
A great gift for acting stands in the same category with a great voice. Both should be used for the delight of mankind, and for the benefit of its possessor. I never see the refined and brilliant performance in private theatricals of these young ladies and gentlemen who rehearse together only a few weeks, and play together only a few times, without thinking what a pity it is that the stage is not a pure and honourable calling, and the dramatic talent not yet recognized as one implanted by the Creator to be developed for his glory and for human happiness as much as any other. I believe Brigham Young's theory and practice on this point the true one; and, humiliating as it may be to learn anything from a Mormon, yet, since Christianity cannot keep people away from the theatre, had it not better go there itself? Would the guilty intrigue be represented, the coarse joke applauded, the immodest dance tolerated, if good and noble men and women organized the stage and "catered for the public,—if ladies and gentlemen of honourable position and spotless name brought acting up to their own level of respectability as a profession, and, as an art, carried it far beyond into regions where it has never
shame if we do not erelong produce a supreme prima donna, for we have now among us one of the great singing- teachers of the world,—Madame Emma Seiler, a German, who has achieved an exhaustive study of the human voice, and completed the most perfect theory of the vocal art ever attempted. She is at present giving private lessons in Philadelphia. But her only true position is at the head of a vocal conservatory for the education of artists and teachers; and I hope the musical world will soon combine to place her there.
