Their journey back in 1765, led them over Holland, where both children were taken very dangerously ill, and the father’s strength for the difficult task of preserving and educating such a boy as Wolfgang, was put to the severest test. Even during the Lenten season, he was allowed, in Amsterdam, to exhibit “for the glory of God” the wonderful gifts of his son, and he finally returned in the fall of 1766, after an absence of more than two years, to Salzburg, laden not so much with money as with the fame of his little ones. The journey taken thus early in life was of great advantage to Mozart himself. He learned to understand men--for his father drew his attention to everything; he even made the boy keep a diary--he got rid of the shyness natural to children, and acquired a knowledge of life. He had listened to the music of the different nations, and thus discovered the manner in which each heart understands that language of the human soul called melody. The refined tone of the higher classes at this time was also of great advantage to his art. The magnificent landscape scenery of his native place had awakened his natural sense of the beautiful; its beautiful situation, its numerous churches and palaces, had further developed that same aesthetic sense; and now the varied impressions received from life and art during these travels, so extensive for one so young, were one of the principal causes why Mozart’s music acquired so early that something so directly attractive, so harmoniously beautiful and so universally intelligible, which characterizes it. But this phase of his music was fully developed only by his repeated long sojourns in that land of beauty itself, in which Mozart spent his incipient youth, in Italy.