He had still a pleasure to come in the visit of the Storaces and Kelly; Mdlle. Storace had packed up Wolfgang's letter intrusted to her so carefully, that she could not get at it, but verbal intercourse with such intimate friends of his son must have been ample compensation for this. Soon afterwards he fell ill, on hearing which Wolfgang wrote as follows (April 4, 1787):-- {ILLNESS AND DEATH OF L. MOZART, 1787.} (323) I have this moment heard what has quite overwhelmed me--all the more since your last letter allowed me to imagine that you were quite well--and now I hear that you are really ill! How earnestly I long for reassuring news from your own hand, I do not need to tell you, and I confidently hope for it, although I have learnt to make it my custom to imagine the worst of everything. Since death (properly speaking) is the true end of life, I have accustomed myself during the last two years to so close a contemplation of this, our best and truest friend, that he possesses no more terrors for me; nothing but peace and consolation! and I thank God for enabling me to discern in death the _key_ to our true blessedness. I never lie down in bed without remembering that perhaps, young as I am, I may never see another day; and yet no one who knows me can say that I am melancholy or fanciful. For this blessing I thank God daily, and desire nothing more than to share it with my fellow men. I wrote to you on this point in the letter which Mdlle. Storace failed to deliver _ä propos_ of the death of my dearest friend Count von Hatzfeld; he was thirty-one--just my own age; I do not mourn for him, but for myself, and all those who knew him as I did. I hope and pray that even as I write this you may be already better; but if, contrary to all expectation, this should not be the case, I conjure you by all that we hold most sacred, not to hide the truth from me, but to write at once, in order that I may be in your arms with the least possible delay. But I hope soon to receive a reassuring letter from yourself, and in this hope, I, with my wife and Carl, kiss your hands a thousand times, and am ever,--Your most dutiful son. This letter puts the seal on the beautiful, genuinely human relations existing between the father and son; in the presence of death, they stand face to face like men, calm in the assurance that true love and earnest efforts after truth and goodness reach beyond the limits of our earthly existence. Leopold Mozart apparently recovered from this attack, and wrote to his daughter on May 26, that he should expect her and her family to spend Whitsuntide with him; but this pleasure was denied to him. On May 28, 1787, a sudden death[16] ended the career of a man who had accomplished, by means of a singular union of shrewdness and industry, of love and severity, the difficult task of educating a child of genius into an artist. {MOZART'S FAMILY AND FRIENDS.} (324)