piness when you know her; if, indeed, in
your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled, honest, virtuous, and
pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."

Late in his short life he writes the following characteristic note to a
friend, whose life does not appear to have been one of the most regular:

"Now tell me, my dear friend, how you are. I hope you are all as well as
we are. You cannot fail to be happy, for you possess everything that
you can wish for at your age and in your position, especially as you
now seem to have entirely given up your former mode of life. Do you not
every day become more convinced of the truth of the little lectures I
used to inflict on you? Are not the pleasures of a transient, capricious
passion widely different from the happiness produced by rational and
true love? I feel sure that you often in your heart thank me for my
admonitions. I shall feel quite proud if you do. But, jesting apart,
you do really owe me some little gratitude if you are become worthy of
Fraeulein N------, for I certainly played no insignificant part in your
improvement or reform.

"My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother,
who in turn told it to her daughter, my mother, who repeated it to her
daughter, my own sister, that it was a very great art to talk eloquently
and well, but an equally great one to know the right moment to stop. I
therefore shall follow the advice of my sister, thanks to our mother,
grandmother, and great-grandmother, and thus end, not only my moral
ebullition, but my letter."

His playful tenderness lavished itself on his wife in a thousand quaint
ways. He would, for example, rise long before her to take his horseback
exercise, and always kiss her sleeping face and leave a little note like
the following resting on her forehead: "Good-morning, dear little wife!
I hope you have had a good sleep and pleasant dreams. I shall be back in
two hours. Behave yourself like a good little girl, and don't run away
from your husband."

Speaking of an infant child, our composer would say merrily, "That boy
will be a true Mozart, for he always cries in the very key in which I am
playing."

Mozart's musical greatness, shown in the symmetry of his art as well as
in the richness of his inspirations, has been unanimously acknowledged
by his brother composers. Meyerbeer could not restrain his tears when
speaking of him. Weber, Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Wagner always praise
him in terms