Thursday, July 21st.—­At dinner a discussion, suggested by Mr. D——­’s conduct to Mr. Brunton, on the subject of returning evil for evil, and the difficulty of not doing so, if not deliberately and in deed, upon impulse and by thought.  Nothing is easier in such matters than to say what one would do, and nothing, I suppose, more difficult than to do what one should do.  So God keep us all from convenient opportunities of revenging ourselves....

[Occasionally one hears in the streets voices in which the making of a fortune lies, and when one remembers what fortunes some voices have commanded, it seems bitterly cruel to think of such a possession begging its bread for want of the chance that might have made it available by culture.  A woman, some years ago, used to sing at night in the neighborhood of St. James’s Street, whose voice was so exquisite, so powerful, sweet, and thrilling, a mezzo soprano of such pure tone and vibrating quality, that Lady Essex, my sister, and myself, at different times, struck by the woman’s magnificent gift and miserable position, had her into our houses, to hear her sing and see if nothing could be done to give her the full use of her noble natural endowment.  She was a plain young woman of about thirty, tolerably decently dressed, and with a quiet, simple manner.  She said her husband was a house-paperer in a small way, and when he was out of employment she used to go out in the evening and see what her singing would bring her.  Poor thing! it was impossible to do anything for her; she was too old to learn or unlearn anything.  No training could have corrected the low cockney vulgarity and coarse, ignorant indistinctness and incorrectness of her enunciation.  And so in after years, as I returned repeatedly to England, after longer or shorter intervals of time, and always inhabited the same neighborhood in London, I still continued to hear, on dark drizzly evenings (and never without a thrill of poignant pain and pity) this angel’s voice wandering in the muddy streets, its perfect, round, smooth edge becoming by degrees blunted and broken, its tones rough and coarse and harsh, some of the notes fading into feeble indistinctness—­the fine, bold, true intonation hiding its tremulous uncertainty in trills and quavers, alternating with pitiful husky coughing, while every now and then one or two lovely, rich, pathetic notes, surviving ruin, recalled the early sweetness and power of the original instrument.  The idea of what that woman’s voice might have been to her used to haunt me.

It was hearing Rachel singing (barefoot) in the streets of Paris that Jules Janin’s attention was first excited by her.  Her singing, as I heard it on the stage in the drinking song of the extraordinary piece called “Valeria,” in which she played two parts, was really nothing more than a chanting in the deep contralto of her speaking voice, and could hardly pass for a musical performance at all, any more than her wonderful uttering of the “Marseillaise,” with which she made the women’s blood run cold, and the men’s hair stand on end, and everybody’s flesh creep.