in public; he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation.

In 1827 he again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's
sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh
year, died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in
his life, at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone. Rousing
himself from the bodily prostration and torpor of grief into which he
had been thrown by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable
energy and that high sense of honor which always distinguished him,
began to set his house in order. He called in all his debts, sold his
magnificent grand "Erard," and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy
heart and a light pocket, but not owing a sou.

He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1828-1840, the
two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a
nine days' wonder, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined
to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral
development. Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No
drawing-room or concert-room success satisfied a heart for which the
world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing
with intuitive intelligence into the "clear-obscure" depths of
religion and philosophy.

But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be
supported. She was his first care. Systematically, he labored to put
by a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his
tender genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words,
"God will help me to repay you for all that you have done for me."
Still he labored, often woefully against the grain. "Poverty," he
writes, "that old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my
solitude devoted to meditation, and placed me before a public on whom
not only my own but my own mother's existence depended. Young and
over-strained, I suffered painfully under the contact with external
things which my vocation as a musician brought with it, and which
wounded me all the more intensely that my heart at this time was
filled entirely with the mystical feelings of love and religion."

[Illustration: Franz Liszt.]

Of course the gifted young pianist's connection grew rapidly. He got
his twenty francs a lesson at the best houses; he was naturally a
welcome guest, and from the first seemed to have the run of high
Parisian society. His life was feverish, his activity i