Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these words: 

“Here rest thee, then! ...  Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the German people’s heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a child believing in the tales and legends of his country.  And though the Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the German alone can love thee.  His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart—­and who shall blame us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a part of our dear German soil.”

CHAPTER XVI.

THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN

Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history.  Happy, too, the man whose love affairs make tame reading.

It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as Mendelssohn lived up to his.  His parents were prophets when they called him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments and rebuffs,—­being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither the Jews nor the Gentiles.  None the less, Mendelssohn’s life was, as human lives go, one of complete felicity.

Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved if one’s childhood years are made pleasant.  Mendelssohn’s home life was so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts, that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal.  Mendelssohn is described as having been “enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of his father,” who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a remarkable spiritual grasp of it.  His mother was something of a pianist, and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost degree.  In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn’s genius bore early fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his Overture to “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” a wonderful fabric of harmony and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence of the sort.

Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life.  Some of her compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many things.  At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at the age of forty-two she died.