she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
the age of forty-two she died.

Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
wrote his mother: "If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
and childlike a mind."

His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was
always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
bedimmed the shining brightness of his character." "He wore his heart
upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
burned all the letters he had written her.

We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the
darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The
fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
case, it was an English