"Davidsbündler." His conviction that he was profiting by his more serious studies and loftier determination is seen, moreover, in his desire to better his earlier work. He did not try to complete the opera "Rübezahl," but he remodelled its overture, which he thought his finest achievement up to that time, and also the overture to "Peter Schmoll." In his one-act operetta "Abu Hassan," composed during a second stay in Mannheim after his return from Frankfort, where he had produced "Sylvana" successfully, modern critics have found the buds of that dramatic genius which came into full flower in "Der Freischütz." His fondness for literary composition grew so strong in this period that, not content with critical essays, he ventured upon a work of fiction. It is impossible not to see in this circumstance and also in the title chosen for the romance, "Tonkünstler's Erdenwallen," a suggestion which Wagner acted on when a generation later he wrote: "Ein Ende in Paris," and "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven." We have reached a point in Weber's career when his aims, ambitions, methods and achievements present so many parallels with those of his direct successor in art that the temptation is strong to put aside the story of the man in favor of an essay in comparative criticism. Each succeeding event in the next few years of his life helps to bring those parallels into a light which is particularly vivid to us who view them from the vantage ground of to-day. When he goes to Prague in January, 1813, to organize a German Opera, we see him enter the portal of the temple which enshrined the goddess of his later idolatry. When he emerges from that temple it is as the High Priest of a new cult, consecrated for the greater task which he accomplished in Dresden, whither he went in 1817. The consecration was two-fold; it entered into his moral life and purged it of the last husks of folly when he married Caroline Brandt on November 4, 1817; it entered into his artistic life when he conceived his mission to be to stimulate a national art-spirit in his country worthy of the spirit of patriotism which had enabled the German people to rid themselves of a foreign oppressor. In Prague he formed his last ignoble attachment. It was for the wife of a dancer at the opera, whose purposes were all mercenary, and whose husband was willing to trade in his wife's honor. The _liaison_ caused immeasurable suffering to the gentle soul of Weber, and was the last of his purging fires. The solace which he found in the love of the singer who had sung in his "Sylvana" at Frankfort and been engaged at Prague at his instance, was perfect. Caroline Brandt did not accept him lightly, and he had time, while wooing her, to learn the value of her sweet purity and recover from the wounds struck by a degrading passion.