n key, and cried to a
one-two-three melody, as his old nurse used to aver, is a little
doubtful, possibly. But all agree that he was the most precocious
musical genius that ever lived, excepting Mozart; and Goethe, who knew
them both, declared that Mendelssohn's music bore the same relationship
to Mozart's as the talk of a grown-up cultured person to the prattle of
a child.

But then Goethe was not a musician, and sixty years had passed from the
time Goethe saw Mozart before he met Mendelssohn. Goethe loved the
brown-curled Jewish boy at sight; and whether on meeting Mozart he ever
recovered from the taint of prejudice that most people feel when a
prodigy is introduced, is a question.

But who can wonder that the old poet's heart went out to the youthful
Mendelssohn as soon as he saw him!

He was a being to fill a poet's dream--such a youth as the Old Masters
used to picture as the Christ when He confounded the wise men. And then
the painters posed this same type of boy as Daniel in the lions' den;
and back in the days of Pericles, the Greeks were fond of showing the
beautiful youth, just approaching adolescence, in the nude, as the god
of Love. When the face has all the soft beauty of a woman, and the
figure, slight, slender, lithe and graceful, carries only a suggestion
of the masculine strength to come--then beauty is at perihelion. The
"Eros" of Phidias was not the helpless, dumpy cherub "Cupid"--he was a
slender-limbed boy of twelve years who showed collar-bone and revealed
every rib.

Beauty and strength of the highest type are never complete--their lure
lies in a certain reserve, and behind all is a suggestion of unfoldment.
Maturity is not the acme of beauty, because in maturity there is nothing
more to hope for--only the uncompleted fills the heart, for from it we
construct the Ideal.

Goethe looked out of his window and seeing Felix Mendelssohn playing
with the children, exclaimed to Zelter, "He is a Greek god in the germ,
and I here solemnly protest against his wearing clothes."

The words sound singularly like the remark of Doctor Schneider, made ten
years later, when Herr Doctor removed the sheet that covered the dead
body of Goethe, and gazing upon the full-rounded limbs, the mighty
chest, the columnar neck and the Jovelike head, exclaimed, "It is the
body of a Greek god!" And the surgeons stood there in silent awe,
forgetful of their task.

Zelter, who introduced Mendelssohn to Goethe, was a fine