n, entering into the spirit of the fun, dexterously caught
the blossoms and tossed them to his players, not even forgetting the
triangles and the boys who played the kettledrums.

Bayard Taylor has described the lustrous brown eyes of Mendelssohn, that
seemed to send rays of light into your own: "Such eyes are the
possession of men who have seen heavenly visions. Genius shows itself in
the eye. Those who looked into the eyes of Sir Walter Scott, Robert
Burns or Lord Byron, always came away and told of it as an epoch in
their lives. This was what I thought when I sat vis-a-vis with Felix
Mendelssohn and looked into his eyes. I did not hear his voice, for I
was too intent on gazing into the fathomless depths of those splendid
eyes--eyes that mirrored infinity, eyes that had beheld celestial glory.
Little did I think then that in two years those eyes would close
forever."

* * * * *

In a letter to Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn's sex-quality is finely
revealed, when he says that his friends are advising him to marry, and
he is on the lookout for a wife.

Ye gods! there is something strangely creepy about the thought of a man
going out in cold blood to seek a wife. Only two kinds of men search for
a wife; one is the Turk, and the other is his antithesis, who is advised
to marry for hygienic, prudential or sociologic reasons. John Ruskin was
"advised" to marry and the matter was duly arranged for him. In a week
he awoke to the hideousness of the condition. Six years elapsed before
John Millais and Chief Justice Coleridge collaborated to set him free,
but the cicatrix remained.

The great books are those the authors had to write to get rid of; the
only immortal songs are those sung because the singers could not help
it. The best-loved wife is the woman who married because her lover had
to marry her to get rid of her; the children that are born because they
had to be are the ones that stock the race; and the love that can not
help itself is the only love that uplifts and inspires.

Felix Mendelssohn, the slight, joyous, girlish youth, should have
preserved his Cecilia-like virginity. He should have left marriage to
those who were capable of nothing else; this would not have meant that
he turn ascetic, for the ascetic is a voluptuary in disguise. He should
simply have been married to his work. The wonder is, though, that once
the thought of marriage was forced upon him, he did not marry a Hittit