Wessely, ever deserted by fortune, lived to see this decay with weeping eyes. Mendelssohn, more fortunate, was spared this pain. Death called him away in time, before he perceived that his circle, even his own daughters, treated with contemptuous scorn and rejected what his heart held to be most sacred, and what he so earnestly strove to glorify. Had he lived ten years longer, even his wisdom would perhaps not have availed him to tide over this anguish. He who without a trace of romance had led an ideal life, died ideally transfigured, at the right moment. The friendship and the philosophy which had elevated his life and brought him fame broke his heart. When Mendelssohn was about to raise a memorial to his unforgotten friend, to show him in his true greatness to future generations, he learned from Jacobi that shortly before his death Lessing had manifested a decided liking for the philosophy of Spinoza. "Lessing a Spinozist!" This pierced Mendelssohn's heart as with a spear. Nothing was so distasteful to him as the pantheistic system of Spinoza, which denied a personal God, Providence, and Immortality, ideas with which Mendelssohn's soul was bound up. That Lessing should have entertained such convictions, and that he, his bosom friend, should know nothing whatsoever about them! Jealousy that Lessing had communicated to others the secret so carefully concealed from himself, and deep disappointment that his friend had not shared his own convictions took possession of Mendelssohn. He suspected, that his philosophy, if it was true that Lessing had not been pleased with it, would become obsolete, and be thrust aside. His whole being rose in resistance against such doubts. These thoughts robbed the last years of his life of rest, made him passionate, excited, feverish. While composing his work in refutation of Jacobi's, "To the Friends of Lessing," excitement so overpowered him that it brought on his death (January 4, 1786). This ideal death for friendship and wisdom worthily concluded his life, and showed him to posterity as he appeared to his numerous friends and admirers, an upright, honest man, in whom was neither falsehood nor guile. Almost the entire population of the Prussian capital, and many earnest men in Germany and beyond its borders mourned the man who, forty years before, with heavy heart had knocked at one of the gates of Berlin, in fear that the Christian or the Jewish beadle would drive him away. The attempt of his Christian friends, Nicolai, Biester, and Engel, the tutor of the Crown Prince Frederick William III, in conjunction with Jewish admirers, to erect a statue to Mendelssohn in the Opera Square next to those of Leibnitz, Lambert, and Sulzer, although it did not meet with approval, characterizes the progress of the time. The deformed son of the so-called "Ten Commandments writer" of Dessau had become an ornament to the city of Berlin. CHAPTER IX. THE NEW CHASSIDISM.