The life of the great German reformer of the lyric stage is a most instructive story. In no respect is it more so than in its illustration of the fact that genius sometimes requires development, that the aspirations of a young man of promise may be altogether out of the line of the inspirations of maturity. Wagner began his musical career as the admirer and imitator of that which was most popular and facile in the lyric drama, and became at last the regenerator of that art which some of his early models had dragged in the mire of time-service and gain. There seems to have been a special providence in the utter failure of his inartistic attempts, which forced him in his despair to write what was in him without hope of pecuniary reward. Destiny drove him toward the goal of fame with the stinging whip of adversity. Wilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipsic, May 22, 1813. His father, Friedrich Wagner, a man of considerable education though simply a police superintendent, died in October of the same year of a nervous fever caused by the carnage at the battle of Leipsic. Left with a family of seven children, of whom Albert, the oldest, was only fourteen, the widow married again. Her second husband was Ludwig Geyer, an actor at the Dresden Court Theatre. He was a man of artistic tastes, a poet, and a portrait painter, and withal a kindly man, who had a fatherly regard for his stepchildren. After removing with his family to Dresden, Geyer died in 1821, and Wagner was once more without a father. The day before his death Geyer bade little Richard play two simple pieces which he had learned to strum on the piano, and said feebly to the mother, “Has he perchance a talent for music?” The next day, when the stepfather lay dead, Wagner’s mother said to him, “He hoped to make something of thee.” And the composer adds in his autobiographic sketch, “I remember, too, that for a long time I imagined that something indeed would come of me.”