re thee, to whatsoever
distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the
German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a
child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the
Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the
German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a
warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart--and who shall blame
us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a
part of our dear German soil."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN

Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
man whose love affairs make tame reading.

It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
and rebuffs,--being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
human lives go, one of complete felicity.

Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony
and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
of the sort.

Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when