oal-black hair.
He might scarcely have been noticed save for his eyes, which overpowered
all else, as the sunlight puts out starlight. Those eyes would have
drawn attention to him anywhere. His peculiar seriousness and his
aristocratic reserve of manner were calculated to keep children at a
distance, even to repel them, and we avoided the stern little man whom
we had heard belonged to the greatest of the great. When he and his
amiable wife became acquainted with our mother, however, and he called
us to him, it is indescribable how his harsh features softened in the
intercourse with us little ones, till they assumed an expression of
the utmost benevolence, and with what penetrating, I might say fatherly
kindness, he talked and even jested with us in his impressive way. I
had the best of it, for my blond curly head struck him as usable in some
work of his, and my mother readily consented to my being his model. So
I had to keep still several hours day after day, though I confess, to
my shame, that I remember nothing about the sittings except having eaten
some particularly good candied fruit.

Even now I smile at the recollection of his making an angel or a spirit
of peace out of the wild boy who perhaps just before had been scuffling
with the enemy from the flower-cellar.

There was another celebrated inhabitant of the Lennestrasse whose
connection with us was still closer than that of Peter Cornelius. It was
the councillor of consistory and court chaplain Strauss, who lived at
No. 3.

Two men more unlike than he and his great artist-neighbour can hardly be
imagined, though their cradles were not far apart, for the painter was
born in Dusseldorf, and the clergyman at Iserlohn, in Westphalia.

Cornelius appears to me like a peculiarly delicate type of the Latin
race, while Strauss might be called a prototype of the sturdy Lower
Saxons. Broad-shouldered, stout, ruddy, with small but kindly blue eyes,
and a resonant bass voice suited to fill great spaces, he was always at
his ease and made others easy. He had a touch of the assured yet fine
dignity of a well-placed and well-educated Catholic prelate, though
combined with the warlike spirit of a Protestant.

Looking more closely at his healthy face, it revealed not only
benevolent amiability but superior sense and plain traces of that cheery
elasticity of soul which gave him such power over the hearts of the
listening congregation, and the disposition and mind of the king