THE tenor, I take to be the happiest man in the world, or, at least, he ought to be. He is the individual whom all the operatic Elviras love. He loves them, also. He has all the serenades to sing. He alone can indulge in the ut de poitrine. Almost invariably, he is allowed to die for the heroine, when he isn't permitted to marry her, and always has a fortissimo death-song given to him, which, like the swan's is the sweetest. What little stage business there is, in the way of kneeling at the feet of the inamoratas, kissing of hands, and embracing of languishing Leonoras, belongs exclusively to him. He also can be the melancholy man, and drown susceptible damsels with tears, over his chalky grief and cork-lined wrinkles of woe. The women dote upon the tenor, send him little billets, look at him through the lorgnettes, and adore him in secret, as Heine's pine adored the palm. He finds bouquets upon his mantel, and little perfumed notes upon his dressing-table. If he be a tenor di grazia, lovely woman will sigh for him; if a tenor robusto, lovely woman will die for him, or wish that Heaven had made her such a man. The amateur tenor enjoys the same advantages as the operatic tenor, on a small scale. He is privileged to sing all the pretty things, and he may sing them as badly as may be, if he is only interesting. He is the idol before which female bread-and-butterhood bends, both Grecian and otherwise. He is usually fragile, spirituel and delicate. He sleeps on the underside of a rose-leaf, drinks Angelica, eats caramels, and catches butterflies. He carries his voice in a lace pocket-handkerchief, when in the open air, and does it up in amber when he retires to sleep upon the rose-leaves. He alone is permitted to wear white kids and vest, and otherwise array himself after the manner of the festive hotel waiter. He knows the secret of immortal youth, and never grows old. All tuneful lays set to the tinkling of flutes, guitars and harps, belong to him. He alone can sing to the moon and address the stars. In his repertoire are all the interesting brigands, the high-born cavaliers, the romantic lovers, and the melancholy artists.

And he has nice legs, or, if he hasn't, he had better degenerate into a baritone, and have done with it.

A tenor without nice legs is worse off than a soprano who can't sing "With Verdure Clad," if there be such a rara avis, or an alto who has to do Siebel and Maffeo Orsini with elephantine ankles, and there never was an alto in the world with whom I wouldn't measure feet, and give them the odds of one or two numbers.

The tenor lives in clover, chin deep, and never gets stung by the bees. Sometimes he forgets to wrap up his voice in the handkerchief when he goes out, or he sleeps in the direct line of a current of air, which comes in under the door, and the result is an indisposition. When he has an indisposition, he goes off hunting ducks at Calumet, instead of dears in the audience, and the manager forgives him and the audience pity him. He doesn't die like other singers, but gradually fades away like the rose, and disappears in a little cloud of perfume.

The basso, on the other hand, is the personification of vocal misery, and he knows it. He feels that he is not interesting at all. He knows the women don't adore him, and he takes a fiendish delight in bellowing at them. He never has an opportunity to languish on the stage, or to go round kneeling and sighing and kissing of hands. He is never a lover. If a brigand, he is a dirty cut-throat. If a cavalier, he is some dilapidated old duke, with a young and pretty wife, just packing up preparatory to elopement with the tenor, and requesting him not to interfere with her little arrangements. If a sailor, he is a swaggering pirate. If an uncle, he is a miser. If a mayor, he is a simpleton. If a father, he is a fool. The composers never give him but one aria in an opera, and that is always written an octave higher than he can sing, or an octave lower than his boot heel. He is always in trouble with the orchestra. He knows he can squelch the first fiddles and reeds, and come out even with the bassoons and double basses, but the man with the trombone is his mortal enemy, and the man with the kettle-drums his skeleton. He feels in his heart of hearts that the one can blow him into ribbons, and the other pound him to a jelly, and what is more, he knows they are never happy, except when they are engaged in that pulverizing process. What little singing he has to do is devoted to panegyrics upon beer, dissertations upon cookery, and lugubrious screeds upon the infidelity of woman and his own ponderous wretchedness. When he is not confined to this, he is set up for a laughing stock in buffo work. He has no runs and trills and sky-rockets with which to dazzle people. He knows that one of his long arias is like a long sermon. He usually has so much voice in his copper-lined and brass-riveted throat, that it invariably gets the better of him, either running like molasses in cold weather, or coming out by fits and starts, and leaking all round the edges. He must inevitably sing false, and it makes him unhappy. He is not at all delicate, being usually doubly blessed in chest and stomach, and the result is, he can't get sick if he tries. The blessed indisposition which so often gets into the velvet throat of the tenor, rarely gets into his, consequently his opportunities for duck-hunting at the Calumet are very limited. All of these afflictions make him misanthropical, and he goes through the world with his little repertoire of "The Calf of Gold," "Infelice," "O mio Palermo," "The Last Man," and the "Wanderer," a very Ishmael of wretchedness, and a howling Dervish of despair. He drinks beer, and all sorts of fiery damnations, eats sausage and kraut with impunity, and smokes villainous tobacco in short clay pipes. He despises the razor and eschews the little weaknesses of kids and patent leathers. The tenor is the nightingale; he is the crow. The tenor is the beloved of women, but for him no serenade, no face in the lattice shaming the moon with its brightness and beauty. I pray, therefore, all gentlefolk to deal kindly with the basso, and make his rough road as smooth as possible, for it is as inevitable as fate that he will live to an hundred years of age, and sing every blessed day of the century, and will finally be gathered to his fathers, singing as he goes.

And, as he goes singing to his fathers, I have another topic of which he reminds me. As I sit here writing, some poor fellow, who has got through with the troubles of the world, is going home to sleep under the turf, which is now so restless with all the quick impulses of spring-life, and which will soon weave a green and flower-embroidered counterpane above him. A band is playing a dirge, the wail and melancholy rhythm of which fall unheeded upon his ears, forever closed to the sweet sounds of the earth. To me, there is something ineffably sad in the playing of a dirge in the open air. The funereal solemnity of the music contrasts so strangely with the beauty of the clear heavens and the joyous life of nature, and interweaves an Andante so unexpectedly in the Scherzo of the din and jargon of the busy street life, that I cannot keep the tears out of my eyes, and I cannot but pause for a minute, on my journey, to think. And I think of the day when I shall drop out of the comedy of life and some one else will take up my part and go on with it, as if I had never been in the play at all. I think that, some bright morning, A will meet B on the street and say: "Did you know that —— died yesterday?" "No! Is that so? What was the matter with him?" And then the two will talk of grain and corner lots, for it was only a bubble that disappeared on the great tide of humanity, ever flowing from one eternity to another. I wonder if anyone will remember me from one spring-birth of flowers to another. And I think of those standing about me, with their hearts beating to the time of the dirges, and with each pulsation approaching a step nearer to the long sleep. And, somehow, although the dirge saddens me, by sending a shadow across the brightness of the sunny day, I think I feel the better for having heard it.

But this will not be the last I shall see or hear of this procession. I know that, an hour later, the mourners will have dried their tears, and that they who went to the grave, marching slowly and with sober countenances, to the movement of the Dead March, will return to the quick tempo of "Champagne Charlie," or some other musical abomination. Have we no respect for the dead! Is it creditable to common humanity to go through the streets uttering a funereal lie—to shovel a man into his grave, and, while the grave-maker is patting the turf with his shovel, to come trotting home to the music of a ribald Casino song? Is human life of no more account than this? Is the life of our friend of so little consequence, when compared with the nonsense and delusions of this world, that we leave him and all recollections of him with the grave-maker? Is there no sober, serious thought for us in the new-made grave? If there is not—if, when a man dies, he dies like a horse, only to be shoved out of sight, the quicker the better, that we may not be delayed any longer than possible from the exactions of business and distractions of pleasure—I pray that those who have these public funerals in charge, may at least consult the feelings of some, to whom such inconsiderate and irreverent unconcern for the dead is a fearful shock.

April 17, 1869.