just a little
feeble smile, and an instant afterwards he rushed up to me and he burst
into a flood of tears as he buried his face in my lap.

"'O Hannerl, my heart's treasure, tell me: Where is my Frida? Why is she
not with me?'"

The dear old Magisterin could say no more; tears of gratitude choked her
voice. I pressed her hand with my right, and with my left hand I brushed
away something that had got between my eyelashes.

CHAPTER III

LEIPSIC IN 1847 AND 1848--MENDELSSOHN'S DEATH

I well remember that first year of my stay in Leipsic, when all our
interests seemed to centre in the friend we were to lose so soon.

At all times I was proud of my godfather, inordinately so, perhaps, when
conversation turned on the great kindness which Goethe had lavished on
his young friend Felix. To know a man who had known Goethe seemed to me
like knowing a man who had known Shakespeare, and I was accordingly
proud of my godfather. It is not surprising that Goethe, the great
dissector of human nature, should, with a few masterly touches, have
portrayed the boy of twelve, and forecast the character of the man. "You
know," he said to his friend Rellstab, "the doctrine of temperaments;
every one has four in his composition, only in different proportions.
Well, this boy, I should say, possesses the smallest possible modicum of
phlegm, and the maximum of the opposite quality." Whatever that
"opposite quality" was which Goethe had in his mind, it was one which
kept Mendelssohn on the alert; it was the very essence of life that he
was drawing on, alas! too prodigally.

Thus, of his own compositions he says in a letter to my father: "How I
am to set about writing a calm and quiet piece (as you advised me to do
last spring) I really do not know. All that passes through my head in
the shape of pianoforte music is about as calm and quiet as Cheapside;
and when I sit down to start improvising ever so quietly, it is of no
use--by degrees I fall back into the old ways."

But if Goethe noted the boy's extreme sensibility, he also appreciated
his sound intellect. "He is so clear-headed about his own subjects," he
says, "that I must learn a great deal from him." And Mendelssohn relates
how, seated at the piano, he familiarises the poet with the work of
Beethoven, how the grand old man is overwhelmed by the beauties and
mysteries revealed, and sits all the while in a dark corner, like a
Jupiter Tonans, with his eyes flashing fire. "I fe