over to
myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life
and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their
hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious
at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully
deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would
invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was
laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:

Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.
Her only mate is now the minstrel lark,
Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
A sister's tears.

Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who
knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors
entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary
and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.

The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful,
like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them
both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The
more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not
interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when
together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions,
too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate
thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their
instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly
intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any
vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London,
sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first
with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of
these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter
or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth.
Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the
reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate
tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of
feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous
region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix,
amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible
calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of
his soul, r