t, an ideal
husband and father. His letters to his wife are full of ardour. It was
a tour through England that exhausted Chopin's last strength, and it
was Weber's fate to die alone in London in the midst of eager
preparations and vast hunger to reach his home. He was not quite forty
when he died, and his life had been two lives, one of unchecked
libertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose. But it was in the
latter half that he wrote his best music.

The domestic and home-establishing influences of music might be pleaded
even more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn. A more musical home
than that in which Mendelssohn grew up, could hardly exist, nor one in
which family life reached a higher level of comfort and delight. Like
Mozart, Mendelssohn was especially devoted to his sister. Her death
indeed grieved him so deeply, that he died shortly after. A man of the
utmost cheer and wholesomeness, revelling in dancing, swimming, riding,
sketching, and billiards; he was idolised in the circle around him,
though his life was not without its enmities. He had many slight
flirtations, but seems to have been even engaged but once, to Cecile
Jeanrenaud, whom he married. His home life was a repetition of that
ideal circle in his father's house. A busier life or a more pleasantly
respectable can hardly be found in the history of men, nor yet a more
truly musical.

A life of similar brilliance and similar musical immersion was that of
Liszt, whose domestic career was nevertheless as different as possible.
A soul of greater generosity, and more zealous altruism in many
respects, it would be hard to find, and yet his relations to women
were, in the conventional view, a colossal and multifarious scandal.
Have we any more right to blame his domestic outrages to the music that
was in him, than to the almost equally intense religious ardour that
fought for him, leading him again and again to seek to enter a
monastery, and finally actually to take orders? Abelard was a
sufficiently tempestuous and irregular lover, yet he was a priest, and
not a musician. Can we then blame harmony and melody for the
humming-bird "amours" of the Abbe Liszt,--for the many women he made
material love to from his early youth,--for the very dubious honesty of
his bearing toward the Comtesse d'Agoult and the Princess Wittgenstein,
with whom he debated the formalities of marriage without hesitating
over the actualities?

There is a strange cluster of d