He was a being to fill a poet's dream--such a youth as the Old Masters used to picture as the Christ when He confounded the wise men. And then the painters posed this same type of boy as Daniel in the lions' den; and back in the days of Pericles, the Greeks were fond of showing the beautiful youth, just approaching adolescence, in the nude, as the god of Love. When the face has all the soft beauty of a woman, and the figure, slight, slender, lithe and graceful, carries only a suggestion of the masculine strength to come--then beauty is at perihelion. The "Eros" of Phidias was not the helpless, dumpy cherub "Cupid"--he was a slender-limbed boy of twelve years who showed collar-bone and revealed every rib. Beauty and strength of the highest type are never complete--their lure lies in a certain reserve, and behind all is a suggestion of unfoldment. Maturity is not the acme of beauty, because in maturity there is nothing more to hope for--only the uncompleted fills the heart, for from it we construct the Ideal. Goethe looked out of his window and seeing Felix Mendelssohn playing with the children, exclaimed to Zelter, "He is a Greek god in the germ, and I here solemnly protest against his wearing clothes." The words sound singularly like the remark of Doctor Schneider, made ten years later, when Herr Doctor removed the sheet that covered the dead body of Goethe, and gazing upon the full-rounded limbs, the mighty chest, the columnar neck and the Jovelike head, exclaimed, "It is the body of a Greek god!" And the surgeons stood there in silent awe, forgetful of their task. Zelter, who introduced Mendelssohn to Goethe, was a fine old character, nearly as fine a type as Goethe himself. Heine once said, "Musicians constitute a third sex." And that there have been some unsexed, or at least unmanly men, who were great musicians, need not be denied. The art of music borders more closely upon the dim and mystic realms of the inspirational than any of the other arts. Music refuses to give up its secrets in a formula and at last eludes the sciolist with his ever-ready theorem. But still, all musicians are not dreamers. Zelter, for instance, was a most hard-headed, practical man: a positivist and mathematician with a turn for economics, and a Gradgrind for facts. He was a stone-mason, and worked at his trade at odd times all through his life, just because he felt it was every man's duty to work with his hands. Imagine Tolstoy playing the piano and composing instead of making shoes, and you have Zelter.