I have not tormented my reader or two with the most insignificant mention of myself between this evening and a time some years before; it would have been impracticable, or, if practicable, impertinent, as I lived those after years entirely within and to myself. The sudden desertion which had stricken Cecilia of her hero lord, and that suspension of his presence which ensued, had no more power upon me than to call out what was, indeed, demanded of me under such circumstances,--all the persistency of my nature. And if even there had been a complete and actual surrender of all her privileges by professors and pupils, I should have been the last to be found there, and I think that I should have played to the very empty halls until ruin hungered for them and we had fallen together. As it happened, however, my solitude was more actual than any I could have provided for myself; my spirit retreated, and to music alone remained either master or slave. The very representative of music was no longer such to me; for when we came together after that fatal midsummer no sign was left of Anastase,--"a new king had arisen in Egypt, who knew not Joseph." To him I ought, perhaps, to confess that I owed a good deal, but I cannot believe it,--I am fain to think I should have done as well alone; but there was that in the association and habitude of the place, that in the knowledge of being still under the superintendence, however formal and abstracted, of its head, that I could not, and would not, have flung up the chances of its academical career. It was, however, no effort to disengage myself from the spot, for any notion of the presence of him I best loved was, alas! now, and had been long, entirely dissociated from it. Not one smile from those fair lips, not one ray from those awful eyes, had sunned the countenances of the ever-studious throng. A monastery could not have been more secluded from the incarnate presence of the Deity than were we in that quiet institution from its distant director. Let it not be imagined, at the same time, that we could have existed in ignorance of that influence which was streaming--an "eastern star"--through the country that contained him as a light of life, which in the few fleeting years of my boyhood had garnered such illustrious immortality for one scarcely past his own first youth. But in leaving Germany I was leaving neither the name nor the fame of Seraphael, except to meet them again where they were dearer yet and brighter than in their cradle-land. None could estimate--and, young as I yet was, I well knew it--the proportion of the renown his early works had gained in this strange country. The noblest attribute of race, the irresistible conception of the power of race, had scarcely then received a remote encouragement, though physiologists abounded; but, like our artists, they lacked an ideal, or, like our politicians, "a man."