he knew not. The convoy passed through the village, and, as it passed, the princesses heard sorrowful voices crying out from the houses by the way: "You who know what it is to suffer here, do not forget us!"

Schamyl joined them, with his Murides, as they passed out of the village. An immense black parasol was borne over his head. They spent the night in Maiour-Toup, the last aoul in Schamyl's possessions. The prisoners were lodged in a house near Schamyl's. In the evening, Schamyl requested them to write to Prince David-Fort Koorinsky, where he then was, was only a dozen miles distantfor Gramof to come immediately. Toward four in the morning, Gramof came. He introduced himself to the Murides on guard, and was taken to the prophet, whom he found stretched out on a carpet, and bolstered up with cushions, before a roaring fire. "What!" said Gramof; not asleep, imaum ?"

"are you

"Thou hast deprived me of sleep tonight. I was waiting for thee."

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And my son," continued Schamyl, after a pause; "is he well?"

66

God be praised; he's in good health."

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"They tell me that he has forgotten every word of Tartar?"

"It is true; for so many years. But do not reproach him for that; he will soon learn to speak your language as well as ever."

he has lived in Russia

"Be sure that I shall let him live as he pleases. All I ask is, that he should stay with me."

Schamyl came round again to his fear of being betrayed by the Russians. Gramof reassured him of their integrity, and Schamyl inquired about the siege of Sebastopol.

"Both sides are still safe," Gramof answered; "nothing has been accomplished yet."

"What!" said Schamyl, "three Czars cannot take a fortress in eight months! After that, I have a right to be proud of holding out against Russia for so many years. It is true, I owe it principally to the forests of my Chechenie, and the precipices of my Daghestan."

So they talked on until six o'clock. Gramof asked permission to see the princesses. Schamyl gave it, but on condition that he should come to see him again. After having reassured the

princesses, who were frightened on his arrival, he went back to Schamyl. The prophet ordered a naïb to show him the precise point at which the exchange was to be made. Before going, Gramof begged Schamyl to forbid his men to fire off their muskets as a mark of joy.

"I would do so," said Schamyl; "but will your troops do the same?"

"Since the death of our emperor, we wear mourning, and consequently are debarred from every mark of joy."

"What! Your emperor dead?" cried Schamyl. "You do well to wear mourning." He added, after a pause: "Well, the son of such a father must be like him. Is his successor really the Alexander who came into the Caucasus not long ago?"

"The same," answered Gramof.

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After reflecting a few moments longer, Schamyl continued: Come, my son; time is pressing; return to Koorinski, and hasten the departure of thy troops. I will not say adieu to thee."

In a few minutes these directions were carried out, the detachment and the arbas crossed the bed of the Michick, Khazi-Mashmet saluted Prince David in the name of his father, and old moollah gave him the title of Alexander, and soon his princess, too, was in his arms. There was an embrace between the long-separated brothers; and the dark-faced Murides, resplendent with gold and silver, set up the sacred chant. "There is no god but God." The Prussian searched the blank countenance of Khazi-Mashmet for some expression of feeling in vain, only a confused smile played around his thin, bloodless lips.

While the prisoners were receiving the congratulation and the sympathy of their friends, Gramof and our Prussian officer accompanied the two sons of Schamyl to their father. All along the way, Djemmal-Eddin was beset by Schamyl's soldiers, who pressed about him to kiss his hands or his garments. The Prussian was crowded away from his side, and was considerably frightened for his personal safety; but Djemmal made room for him, by sharp Russian words which the mountaineers could not understand, and threatening gestures which they could.

When they reached the Michick, Djemmal took off his Russian uniform, and transformed himself into a mountaineer from top to toe, the Murides, meantime, admired the Prussian's English sad

dle, and a percussion-lock pistol that he wore. Djemmal mounted a magnificent horse which his father had sent him, and they went on. Soon the third son of Schamyl, Mashmet-Shabi, rushed through the ranks, and, with a loud cry of joy, embraced his step-brother. When they reached the foot of the mound, which Schamyl occupied, they dismounted and walked up in silence.

Above Schamyl waved his great black flag, covered with verses from the Koran, worked in silver with a crescent of massive silver over all. To the Prussian, Schamyl appeared to be a stately man of about fifty-five, with beautifully-regular features, and a black beard, which was evidently the object of considerable care. Feeling and soul spoke from his large dark eyes. He was unarmed, and his dress consisted of a fullgreen caftan, with the fur cap and veil of the Murides. Djemmal stepped for

ward to kiss his father's hand-Schamyl clasped him to his breast, held him long, and wept over him like a child. And all the troops, near and distant, raised the oft-repeated cry: "There is no god but God." The Prussian grew enthusiastic; he saw in the expressive eyes of Schamyl a "deep melancholy, which arose, perhaps, from the consciousness of the moral misery of his people, and the hopelessness of all his attempts to bring them up to a higher level, or to secure to them that independence which they neither knew how to prize, nor preserve." After the first embrace, Schamyl placed Djemmal on his right, again and again pressing his hand, while he said to those present: "I thank God who has, preserved my son; the emperor who has given him back to me; the princes who have contributed to his return; and thee, Isaï-Bek, for thy good services."

UNQUESTIONABLY the most striking passage in the history of music is the rise and unbroken continuity of that series of composers which has made Germany, for the last century and a half, the musical centre of the world. The great period of German poetry began almost simultaneously. The

thunders with which Bach, from his organ, inaugurated the grandest triumphs of the one art, would scarcely be subsided before Klopstock, in his Odes, sung a noble advent hymn to the Augustan era of the other. They were alike, too, in rapid progress towards perfection.

As poetry culminated in Goethe, who has himself shown how far his all-inclusive genius represented that which had gone before, so, at a later period, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy resumed in the great circle of his creative power those splendors of musical faculty which had preceded him. From Bach down to Beethoven there is no great composer with whom Mendelssohn had not much in common, though, as we shall see, he had his own matter and mode of the loftiest order.

We do not,

indeed, mean to say that the actual

products of Mendelssohn's genius fully bear out an analogy with Goethe. "Ars longa, vita brevis," was more mournfully true for the composer than for the poet. Though the former early began his work and bent to it with a brave earnestness through all his brief career, many a golden link is wanting to the chain with which we might have taken the full measure of his powers.

The general parallel between German music and German poetry fails in one particular. Other countries besides Germany had great living poets, but the music of that land was the music of all the world. In imaginative_writing France had great names and England still greater; but the sturdiest patriotism of both could but admit that there were but one Haydn, one Mozart, and one Beethoven. The only other contemporary school of music, that of Italian opera, serves, by contrast with its own light and sensuous character, to show where the soul and intellect of the art found their native energy. The Rhine and its wines were not more unique phenomena to the touring and

bibbing portion of European society than the music which sprung into being in their neighborhood was to all lovers of the tuneful art.

After the existence of this concentrated interest for more than a hundred years, Mendelssohn, in succession to Beethoven, was its direct heir. In the presence of Weber, Meyerbeer, and Spohr, he was facile princeps amongst the composers of his time and country. As a proof and a consequence of this, there is now scarcely a performance of high-class music in any part of the world, from the programme of which Mendelssohn's name is omitted. How, and under what circumstances, he attained this great position within the few years vouchsafed to him, is an inquiry, we hope, not without interest to general readers.

In the early life of Mendelssohn not one favorable augury for a noble future was wanting. The very race from which he sprung was the primæval fountain of sacred melody. He held kinship to Miriam, and "the sweet singer of Israel." His more immediate genealogy was not undistinguished. His grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, a kind of Hebrew-German Plato, who, in the years when German literature was putting on its strength, stood with mild philosophic countenance by the side of Lessing, Wieland, and Klopstock, and was in no degree dwarfed by the stature of his contemporaries. To the dignified Theism of the grandfather the sacred music of the grandson seems to succeed in the same relative order as the new to the old dispensation.

While, however, a great Jew philosopher was well enough for the penultimate link in Mendelssohn's ancestry, the ultimate was still better; for his father was a rich banker, possessing all resources to lavish upon the culture of the son, and an eye to see in him something worthy to tax them all. The genial banker occupied his proud intermediate position between Moses and Felix without sharing the genius of either; but that position was not to him the "point of indifference," for he showed a humorous appreciation of the honor in his habitual saying, “When I was a boy people used to call me the son, and now they call me the father of the great Mendelssohn." Nor was there wanting to the early direction of the composer's powers that blessed in

fluence which has entered as a primary element into nearly all that is great in human deed, the fostering care of a tender and thoughtful mother. She was of a distinguished family of the name of Bartholdy, but it was her chief distinction and happiness that she gave to her son his last name and his first musical impressions.

-a

Mendelssohn, the second of four children, was born in Hamburgh on the 3d of February, 1809, in a house behind the church of St. Michael, which house the author of the German "Memorial" takes care to inform us was left standing by the great fire of Hamburgh circumstance which, in these degenerate days, we find it difficult to attribute to any remains of that musical susceptibility which the elements were wont to show in the days of Orpheus and "old Amphion." The child's leading taste displayed itself at an amazingly early age, and it was carefully nurtured and every appliance furnished for its development. No need in his case, as in poor little Handel's, for stealthy midnight interviews with a smuggled clavicord in a secret attic; nor, as in the case of Bach, for copying whole books of studies by moonlight for want of the candle, churlishly denied.

Mendelssohn's childhood and youth present as fair a picture of healthy and liberal culture as educational records can show. A warm and discerning affection charged the atmosphere in which he grew up with every influence that could elicit and strengthen his latent capacities. About his third or fourth year the family removed to Berlin, and here, under the training of Berger, he acquired his mastery over the pianoforte, which in his eighth year he played with wonderful finish; while in the theory of music he had made so much progress under rough old Zelter --best known as the friend and correspondent of Goethe-that his tutor was fond of telling with a grim smile how the child had detected in a concerto of Bach six of those dread offenses against the grammar of music -- consecutive fifths. "The lad plays the piano like the devil," says Zelter to Goethe, amongst many other ejaculations of wonder at Mendelssohn's early musical development.

Finally, in 1821, he brought his pupil on a visit to Goethe at Weimar, and with this event commenced the long