the attention of his most distinguished masters. He carried off the
second prize at nineteen, and at twenty-one received the grand prize for
musical composition awarded by the French Institute. His first published
work was a mass performed at the Church of St. Eustache, which, while
not specially successful, was sufficiently encouraging to both the young
composer and his friends.

Gounod now proceeded to Rome, where there seems to have been some
inclination on his part to study for holy orders. But music was not
destined to be cheated of so gifted a votary. In 1841 he wrote a second
mass, which was so well thought of in the papal capital as to gain for
the young composer the appointment of an honorary chapel-master for
life. This recognition of his genius settled his final conviction that
music was his true life-work, though the religious sentiment, or
rather a sympathy with mysticism, is strikingly apparent in all of his
compositions. The next goal in the composer's art pilgrimage was the
music-loving city of Vienna, the home of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and
Schubert, though its people waited till the last three great geniuses
were dead before it accorded them the loving homage which they have
since so freely rendered. The reception given by the capricious Viennese
to a requiem and a Lenten mass (for as yet Gounod only thought of sacred
music as his vocation) was not such as to encourage a residence. Paris,
the queen of the world, toward which every French exile ever looks with
longing eyes, seemed to beckon him back; so at the age of twenty-five
he turned his steps again to his beloved Lutetia. His education was
finished; he had completed his _Wanderjahre_; and he was eager to enter
on the serious work of life.

He was appointed chapelmaster at the Church of Foreign Missions, in
which office he remained for six years, in the mean while marrying
a charming woman, the daughter of Herr Zimmermann, the celebrated
theologian and orator. In 1849 he composed his third mass, which made a
powerful impression on musicians and critics, though Gounod's ambition,
which seems to have been powerfully stimulated by his marriage, began
to realize that it was in the field of lyric drama only that his powers
would find their full development. He had been an ardent student in
literature and art as well as in music; his style had been formed on the
most noble and serious German models, and his tastes, awakened into full
activity, carried