ith curling
auburn hair, brilliant clear eyes, and lips smiling with innocence and
candor. Five minutes after young Mendelssohn had astonished his English
friend by his admirable performance of several of his own compositions,
he forgot Weber, quartets, and counterpoint, to leap over the garden
hedges and climb the trees like a squirrel. When scarcely twenty years
old he had composed his octet, three quartets for the piano and strings,
two sonatas, two symphonies, his first violin quartet, various operas,
many songs, and the immortal overture of "A Midsummer-Night's Dream."

Mendelssohn received an admirable education, was an excellent classicist
and linguist, and during a short residence at Dusseldorf showed such
talent for painting as to excite much wonder. Before he was twenty he
was the friend of Goethe and Herder, who delighted in a genius so
rich and symmetrical. Some of Goethe's letters are full of charming
expressions of praise and affection, for the aged Jupiter of German
literature found in the promise of this young Apollo something of the
many-sided power which made himself so remarkable.

II.

The Mendelssohn family had moved to Berlin when Felix was only three
years old, and the Berliners always claimed him as their own. Strange
to say, the city of his birth did not recognize his talent for many
years. At the age of twenty he went to England, and the high breeding,
personal beauty, and charming manner of the young musician gave him
the _entree_ into the most fastidious and exclusive circles. His first
symphony and the "Midsummer-Night's Dream" overture stamped his power
with the verdict of a warm enthusiasm; for London, though cold and
conservative, is prompt to recognize a superior order of merit.

His travels through Scotland inspired Mendelssohn with sentiments
of great admiration. The scenery filled his mind with the highest
suggestions of beauty and grandeur. He afterward tells us that "he
preferred the cold sky and the pines of the north to charming scenes in
the midst of landscapes bathed in the glowing rays of the sun and azure
light." The vague Ossianic figures that raised their gigantic heads in
the fog-wreaths of clouded mountain-tops and lonely lochs had a peculiar
fascination for him, and acted like wine on his imagination. The
"Hebrides" overture was the fruit of this tour, one of the most powerful
and characteristic of his minor compositions. His sister Fanny (Mrs.
Hensel) asked him to