In Leipsic his hands were soon full of most congenial tasks: conducting the _Messiah_; the _Israel in Egypt_, with his own organ part; his own _St. Paul_; besides a series of historical concerts; and composing his Forty-Second Psalm, E-minor string Quartet, the D-minor piano Concerto, the three organ Preludes and Fugues, etc. And is it not worth notice, by the way, that here Mendelssohn commonly shines as the best of programme-makers? Indeed, he seems to have been the first in whom that function rose to the dignity of an art, when he was not balked by others. Certainly the concerts, ("academies") which Mozart and Beethoven gave mostly in noble houses, to make their new works heard, offered no models of good programme-making, containing often far too much of a good thing, say three great Beethoven Symphonies, with much other matter, in a single evening! The democratic age of concert-giving had not yet come in. In all this he was strong and happy in the sympathetic companionship of his young wife, though often torn from her to fulfil engagements at the Birmingham Festival and elsewhere. Thenceforth for several years he gave his heart and soul to Leipsic, chiefly to the Gewandhaus concerts; he worked with enthusiasm, and was rewarded by the enthusiasm he created. In June, 1838, he conducted the Cologne Festival, and we have a cogent letter in which he induced the committee to include "at least one important vocal work of Bach" (a Church Cantata) in the programme, besides pieces from Handel's _Joshua_. The summer was spent in the dear garden-house at Berlin; and that was the young wife's first introduction to her husband's family. He kept on composing noble things; among them the Violin Concerto and a Psalm for eight voices: "When Israel," etc. And he fell just short of giving the world another Symphony (in B flat). The great event of the next Gewandhaus season was the first performance, at the last concert (March 22, 1839), of the great Schubert Symphony in C. It was played from the MS., which had been found in Vienna by Schumann. It would require a volume to detail the programmes of those ten or eleven years of Gewandhaus concerts under his direction,--to say nothing of great musical enterprises outside of all that. In December, 1842, his mother died, and then the Berlin house was his. Yet he lived for the most part in Leipsic, aiding as a professor, with David, Hauptmann, Schumann and the like, in the carrying out of his pet scheme of a Conservatorium of Music. Since 1838 _Elijah_ had been in his mind as the subject of an oratorio. It was finished for the Birmingham Festival of 1846. He was on hand there to conduct it, all the world knows with what success. Yet his own fastidious taste saw much in it to alter and polish, and he returned to England for the tenth and last time to conduct it in the revised edition, so to speak. [Illustration: WILLIAM HENSEL. From a pencil drawing made by himself.]