A winter’s residence in Frankfort, which of late years is somewhat distinguished for the excellence of its opera, and the high degree of culture attained by its various musical unions, sufficed to make me familiar with many of the great works of the German composers. Fortunately, it was not until after I had learned to feel the all-pervading soul of beauty which inspired Mozart, and paused in awe on the borders of Beethoven’s vast and solemn realm, that I heard the music of Mendelssohn. Thus prepared, in part, the simple and severe grandeur of his style impressed me with a consciousness of its power, though I could not always grasp the spirit of the sound, and follow it back to the sublime conception—as, when a schoolboy, I first opened the pages of Milton, and read with wonder and delight what it would have puzzled me exceedingly to explain. Mendelssohn’s music is of a more purely intellectual character than that of any modern composer, and his greatest works are those which but few thoroughly appreciate. While, in his “Songs without Words,” and the simple grandeur of his sacred melodies, he comes nearer to the general sympathy, his “Walpurgisnacht,” and “Fingal’s Cave,” creations of startling power and sublimity, which stand alone in the character of their expression, are rarely produced, except in those German cities where the taste for music has not been led away from the standard set up by the schools of Bach and Hayden, by the voluptuous melodies of the modern Italian opera. Frankfort is one of these cities, and I was fortunate enough to hear the Walpurgisnacht performed by the Cæcilien-Verein, or Society of St. Cecilia. The poetry of Goethe and the music of Mendelssohn!—it was a sublime marriage of genius. The works of the latter are as full of wild and stormy pictures as those of the former, and he has described in music the crags and breakers of the bleak Hebrides, with as much power as Goethe exhibits, in painting the savage scenery of the Brocken. Mendelssohn was living in Frankfort during the winter I spent there, and I was naturally anxious to see the face of a great man, whom there was no probability of my ever being near again, in the course of my wanderings. One sunny day in March, when all the population of Frankfort seemed to have turned out upon the budding promenades which belt the city, and the broad quays along the Main, to enjoy the first premonition of spring, I went on my usual afternoon stroll with my friend and countryman, W——, whose glowing talk upon the musical art was quite as refreshing to me after the day’s study in the gloomy Marktplotz, as were the blue mountains of Epessart, which are visible from the bridge over the Main.