at musician.

But a father and mother with a maiden of genius on their hands were
like a hen whose duckling takes to the water. The difference of the
training of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, as distinguished from their
musical education, is effectually indicated by the following letter
from their father to Fanny, written when she was fourteen years old.
After referring in terms of satisfaction to the compositions of both
his son and daughter, Abraham Mendelssohn proceeded to say to the
latter of his two gifted children:

"What you wrote to me about your musical occupations, with reference to
and in comparison with Felix, was both rightly thought and expressed.
Music will, perhaps, become _his_ profession (Felix was at this time
only nine years old. Fanny was fourteen), whilst for _you_ it can and
must be only an ornament, never the root of your being and doing. We
may, therefore, pardon him some ambition and desire to be acknowledged
in a pursuit which appears to him important, while it does you credit
that you have always shown yourself good and sensible in these matters;
and your very joy at the praise he earns proves that you might, in his
place, have merited equal approval. Remain true to these sentiments
and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly
feminine is an ornament to your sex."

Ten more precious years of youth, the years of training and of hope,
passed by; the different ideal was persistently forced by the parents
upon the two, although Fanny, more fortunate than many girls, was,
nevertheless, allowed to study her art as well as she could in
intervals of housekeeping. On her twenty-third birthday, her father
again felt it necessary to check his gifted daughter in her pursuit of
her art. He wrote her a letter in which he praised her conduct in the
household.

"However," he added, "you must still improve. You must become still
more steady and collected, and prepare more earnestly and eagerly for
your real calling, the _only_ calling of a woman,--I mean the state of
a housewife. Women have a difficult task; the constant occupation with
apparent trifles, the interception of each drop of rain, that it may
not evaporate, but be conducted into the right channel, the unremitting
attention to every detail,--all these are the weighty duties of a
woman."

The time came, at length, for Fanny Mendelssohn to love,--that crisis
came which stimulates a man in his work, and nerves hi