s journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year
I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their
father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to
be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once
more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let
God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'

"The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of
bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The
time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to
see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying
man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children--another
long lingering kiss--the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the
carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs--the door was closed--and he
rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the
shattered chest might almost burst at once.

"Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:
'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'

"At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own
horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His
voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber;
and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to
fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far
as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always
repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's
sorrow."

Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the
whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after
the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of
weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of
personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but
"Der Freischuetz," and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers
always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.

His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages
seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had
to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during
the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the
worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart,
was h