enoese became pale as death. He
seized the little fellow with furious hands, drew a stiletto from
its sheath, and buried it in the young rogue's breast.

At this moment, however, a shout of "Bravo! Bravo!" broke out from
all sides. Hamburg's enthusiastic sons and daughters were paying
the tribute of their uproarious applause to the great artist, who
had just ended the first of his concert, and was now bowing with
even more angles and contortions than before. And on his face the
abject humility seems to me to have become more intense. From his
eyes stared a sorrowful anxiety like that of a poor malefactor.
"Divine!" cried my neighbor, the furrier, as he scratched his ears;
"that piece alone was worth two thalers."

When Paganini began to play again a gloom came before my eyes. The
sounds were not transformed into bright forms and colors; the
master's form was clothed in gloomy shades, out of the darkness of
which his music moaned in the most piercing tones of lamentation.

Only at times, when a little lamp that hung above cast its
sorrowful light over him, could I catch a glimpse of his pale
countenance, on which the youth was not yet extinguished. His
costume was singular, in two colors, yellow and red. Heavy chains
weighed upon his feet. Behind him moved a face whose physiognomy
indicated a lusty goat-nature. And I saw at times long, hairy hands
seize assistingly the strings of the violin on which Paganini was
playing. They often guided the hand which held the bow, and then a
bleat-laugh of applause accompanied the melody, which gushed from
the violin ever more full of sorrow and anguish. They were melodies
which were like the song of the fallen angels who had loved the
daughters of earth, and being exiled from the kingdom of the
blessed, sank into the underworld with faces red with shame. They
were melodies in whose bottomless depths glimmered neither
consolation nor hope. When the saints in heaven hear such melodies,
the praise of God dies upon their paled lips, and they cover their
heads weeping. At times when the obligate goat's laugh bleated in
among the melodious pangs, I caught a glimpse in the background of
a crowd of small women-figures who nodded their odious heads with
wicked wantonness. Then a rush of agonizing sounds came from the