Thus was Mozart’s relations with Salzburg, which had never brought him much happiness or honor, dissolved for all time. He lost, it is true, by this dissolution, the loving confidence of his father; but painful as this loss was to him, it was not without compensation. He obtained personal freedom and conquered for himself a place in which his already highly developed individuality as an artist was at liberty to act, room for the workings of his creative genius. This and his love and marriage, which put him in possession of something which he could permanently call his own, are further decisive events in our artist’s life. We shall see their effects on his art, and, in the creation of such magnificent works as the “Elopement from the Seraglio,” “Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.” His recent personal experience had given him that insight and that inward freedom without which his towering, life-experienced style and his supreme power of depicting character are impossible. The time and place were favorable to the production of such works. And it was not simply the oppressive feeling of the humiliating and narrowing circumstances of his position hitherto, but the joyful consciousness that, as his genius soon perceived, he was at last in the place in the world best suited to his taste, in Vienna, that this time caused him to conceive and hold fast to his desire. _Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel waer!_--“And though the world were full of devils!”--we may discover something of the desperate resolution which these words imply, in his struggle at this time with his dearest of fathers; a resolution generated, doubtless, by the circumstances in which he now saw himself suddenly and accidentally placed, and which were so favorable to his art, and to a becoming mode of living. He felt that he had come here to grow to his full stature; and the instinct of artistic creation, like the instinct of love, is involuntary and irresistible. The father did not understand this. He had to be won over by prospects of material success, and this success Wolfgang was able confidently to promise himself and his father. Nor was he wanting here. And if we are obliged to confess that Mozart, even in the rich city of Vienna, almost starved, and that he died before his time, the cause was, in the first place, that his genius was too great to be fully appreciated by his contemporaries and his environment, and then that he was so wrapped up in his sublime task, that the world gradually receded from him, and it became an easy matter for the envious and his enemies to rob him of the visible fruits of his success, and to limit him to the joys and sunshine of his art. His art, indeed, throve even in Vienna, far beyond what he had hoped. It was more than his contemporaries could appreciate or understand. And, indeed, where would we be to-day without Mozart? As well as Goethe, he touched the purest, the ultimate feeling of beauty