Paganini's tour was one continual triumphal progress. At Königsberg his first concert realised about £330, an unprecedented sum in that place; at Frankfort his four concerts produced something like £1,000. A critic wrote of him: "One striking peculiarity of his playing is the extraordinary effect it produces on persons wholly devoid of musical cultivation. Most _virtuosi_ play only for the learned; not so Paganini. His performance is alike appreciated by men of business and connoisseurs, by children and grown persons--it is felt and understood by all. This is the distinctive characteristic of all that is great in art." He was at Leipzig in 1829, and was among the visitors at the house of Abraham Mendelssohn--the pleasant garden-house in the Leipziger Strasse--and his portrait figures in Hensel's collection. In June, 1830, Paganini was in Cassel, when Spohr heard him for the first time--of which more later. In Hamburg the same year Heine heard him, and his vivid and extraordinary notice of the artist must be briefly quoted. "I believe," said Heine, "that only one man has succeeded in putting Paganini's true physiognomy upon paper--a deaf painter, Lyser by name, who in a frenzy full of genius has with a few strokes of chalk so well hit the great violinist's head that one is at the same time amused and terrified at the truth of the drawing. 'The devil guided my hand,' the deaf painter said to me, chuckling mysteriously, and nodding his head with a good-natured irony in the way he generally accompanied his genial witticisms.... The Hamburg Opera House was the scene of this concert, and the art-loving public had flocked there so early, and in such numbers, that I only just succeeded in obtaining a little place in the orchestra." Then he goes on to describe the audience and the entrance of Paganini. "Is that a man brought into the arena at the moment of death, like a dying gladiator, to delight the public with his convulsions? Or is it one risen from the dead, a vampire with a violin, who, if not the blood out of our hearts, at any rate sucks the gold out of our pockets? Such questions crossed our minds while Paganini was performing his strange bows, but all those thoughts were at once still when the wonderful master placed his violin under his chin and began to play. As for me, you already know my musical second-sight, my gift of seeing at each tone a figure equivalent to the sound, and so Paganini with each stroke of his bow brought visible forms and situations before my eyes; he told me in melodious hieroglyphics all kinds of brilliant tales; he, as it were, made a magic lantern play its coloured antics before me, he himself being chief actor.... A holy, ineffable ardour dwelt in the sounds, which often trembled, scarce audibly, in mysterious whisper on the water, then swelled out again with a shuddering sweetness, like a bugle's notes heard by moonlight, and then finally poured forth in