Thaxter
consented to read Browning or Tennyson to her friends. I think it was
the finest reading I ever heard, simply because it was neither dramatic,
rhetorical, nor elocutionary. It was plain, distinct reading with just
enough of the dramatic element to give fullness to the meaning,--and
with such a voice! Why is it that some people who have unpleasant voices
are yet able to sing sweetly, and others who cannot sing are able to
read or converse so it is music to hear them? I was formerly acquainted
with an old man, much beyond the period of life when singers retire from
the stage, whose voice was nevertheless, as one heard it at some
distance, as musical as a Stradivarius.
With all her frankness and fearlessness, she was as sensitive to
personal influences as poets usually are; and persons who called on her,
who lacked delicacy of feeling, not only wearied her, but sometimes
caused her positive suffering. In such cases she fortified herself with
what she called a strong dose of conversation; would talk with great
volubility on all possible subjects, as if in this manner to keep the
unpleasant influence at a distance. "I wish all good people," she said,
"were pleasant, and all the bad people disagreeable; for then life would
be a more simple affair than it is now. The world is such a mixture that
I never quite know how to take it."
At times she was a merciless critic.
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