its sweetness manifold;
On every white and purple flower 'tis written,
Its echo every aspen-quake hath smitten,
Adelaida!

"Go farther! let me leave thee! I depart!--
Who whispered I would linger by thy side?
Who said it beat so warm, my feeble heart?
Who told, I dared to claim thee as my bride?
Who cried, I roamed without thee all the day
And clasped thee in my dreams? Away, away,
Adelaida!

"I die, but thou shall live; in the loud noon
Thy feet shall crush the long grass o'er my head,
Not rudely, rudely,--gently, gently, soon
Shall tread me heavier down in that dark bed;
And thou shalt know not on whose head they pass,
Whose silent hands, whose frozen heart!--Alas,
Adelaida!"

There are those who in "Charles Auchester," charmed by the simplicity
and truth of that first part called "Choral Life," objected to the rest
on the score of extravagance. But this book records the adoration of
music, and in an age replete with the _dilettanti_ of indifference may
we not thank God for one enthusiast? Yet, indeed, everything about
Mendelssohn was itself extravagant,--his childhood, his youth, his life,
his beauty, his power: should the instrument, then, be tuned lower than
such key-note? And again, to us who live a somewhat commonplace routine,
the life of musical artists, especially abroad, must necessarily seem
redundant; yet it is only that life, natural and actual, into which we
are here inducted. The same is possible to no other class of artists:
even the scholar, buried in his profound studies, must descend from his
abstraction; the poet, the painter, cannot share it: for the latter,
however much he clubs and cliques, is seldom sufficiently dispossessed
of himself; and the other, though he strike out of his heat poems as
immortal as stars, may yet live among clods and feel no thrill returning
on himself. But the musician cannot dwell alone: his art requires that
he should cluster, and the orchestra enforces it; therefore he acts and
reacts like the vibrations ridged within a Stradivarius, he is kept in
his art's atmosphere till it becomes his life, its aura bathes every
trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised
and glorified. Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the
musician's life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of
the author to idealize, one can believe "Charles Auchester" to be but a
faithful transcript. "In proportion