There had been a great inundation the week previous, and the cold, wintry storms which accompanied it, had just given place to sunshine and milder air. The boatmen upon the flat, clumsy barges which come down from Würzburg and the upper Main, were loosening their lashings and preparing to trust themselves upon the swollen waters. The music of Savoyards and bands of mountain singers was heard in every open space, and brave, ruddy-looking Tyrolese, wild-eyed Bohemians in their quaint, national costume, and the men of Suabia and the Black Forest, mingled with the crowd, till it seemed like a holyday assemblage made up from all the German provinces. We threaded the motley multitude, finding a pleasant pastime in reading their faces and costumes, turning rapidly, as it were, the leaves of a historical picture book. My eye was finally caught by a man who came toward us on the quay, and whose face and air were in such striking contrast to those about him, that my whole attention was at once fixed upon him. He was simply and rather negligently dressed in dark cloth, with a cravat tied loosely about his neck. His beard had evidently not been touched for two or three days, and his black hair was long and frowzed by the wind. His eyes, which were large, dark and kindling, were directed forward and slightly lifted, in the abstraction of some absorbing thought, and as he passed, I heard him singing to himself in a voice deep but not loud, and yet with a far different tone from that of one who hums a careless air as he walks. But a few notes caught my ear, yet I remember their sound, elevated and with that scarcely perceptible vibration which betrays a feeling below the soul’s surface, as distinctly now as at the time. W—— grasped my arm quickly and said in a low voice, “Mendelssohn!” I turned hastily, and looked after him, as he went down the quay, apparently but half conscious of the stirring scenes around him. I could easily imagine how the balmy, indolent sensation in the air, so like a soothing and tranquilizing strain of music, should have led him into the serene and majestic realm of his own creations.