Obstacle after obstacle was placed in the way of the completion of both works. The Bohemians had ordered a great opera, _Titus the Mild_, for Leopold’s coronation. There were only a few weeks remaining during which it could be written. Mozart started immediately on his journey. It was the middle of August. Constance again accompanied him. As they were entering the carriage, the mysterious messenger in gray stood before them. Mozart quieted him with the assurance that the _Requiem_ was the first task that would engage him after his return. Yet this seemed to him a new warning not to postpone the last work of his life; for such he considered the _Requiem_ to be. He felt unwell even now. He overworked himself in Prague--_Titus_ was written and put in rehearsal within a fortnight--and thus accelerated the breaking down of his already over-taxed, vital energies. Added to this was the want of success of the opera. He had this time forgotten the rule “hasten slowly,” and the quintet in great dramatic style in the first finale, could not conceal from his Prague audience, who were certainly indulgent, the absence of the artist’s peculiar skill. Titus remained an _opera seria_, a bundle of arias, and the applause Mozart was wont to meet with, failed him, even in Prague. He was very much depressed in consequence. He again, indeed, recovered his native cheerfulness, but in leaving Prague the tears flowed abundantly. He had a presentiment that he would never see those friends again. In the middle of September, he was in Vienna once more. The _Magic Flute_ was to be put on the stage, and might serve to make up what he had lost of reputation in Prague. Besides, it was part of his great life task. King Leopold had abolished the order of Free Masons, and it, therefore, now seemed to Mozart, simply a duty he owed to his order to put its humane aims in their true light, by every means in his power. And what a refulgence streams from the choruses of the second act, from the overture which, as well as the introductory march of the same act, so suggestive of _Idomeneo_, was only just written! “Through night to light!”--such is the sense in which Mozart wrote and understood the entire work, the accidental garb of which did not mislead him in the least. Into one of the pieces descriptive of this earnestness of moral trial of the heart, Mozart went as far as to weave a Protestant chorale. It is the song of the _Geharnischten Maenner_--the “men in mail;” and its “figuration” shows that Mozart had added Bach’s artistic characteristics to his own. But he had also appropriated his spirit of deep piety and genuine virtue! Nothing exhibits more clearly how solemn and high his vocation as an artist was to him, nor proves more forcibly that, for him, there was no secluded spot where alone the ideal and the divine were to be taught. The ideal and the divine should, like the sun, shed their rays everywhere, and