It is with quickly beating hearts that we cross once more the threshold of this dwelling, which, in spite of the cordial reception always awaiting us, we feel to be consecrated ground, the holy of holies, which should not be penetrated without a sort of sacred awe. The whole family is assembled in the drawing-room, which is brightened by a ray of sunlight. Liszt, who has come to pass a few weeks with his dear grandchildren, is superb, with his long white hair, his bushy eyebrows, beneath which shine a lion's eyes. My godson is already growing large; he has a broad forehead, and blue eyes of exquisite sweetness. The master comes up from the garden, always the same, even younger. Truly the immortals defy time. He receives us with that tender effusion with which those of his followers, by whom he knows himself perfectly loved, inspire him, for he has nothing of the impassable egotism which so often attacks great men when they arrive at a certain height of glory. He is rather, as we have already said, too impressionable, allows himself to be governed by the momentary violence of his impressions; and the only uneasiness he causes to those who surround him, who live only for him, proceeds from this intensity in his sadness or joy, or from his anger, which a nature less tempered than his would not be able to resist. He can sometimes forget, even completely change, his opinion, love that which he once detested, and always with the same sincerity. We pass to the dining-room. The master is now rapturously gay; he expresses himself with some difficulty in French, which does not, however, prevent his playing upon the words as no one else can. He tells us of his journey to Naples and Venice, of the pleasure he has derived from Italy, and we quickly divine in him a longing for the sun and new horizons; he is thinking of Greece, the Bosporus, India. Oh Wahnfried, Wahnfried! One thing evidently wearies him greatly; it is the instrumentation of Parsifal. He complains of not being able to form young artists capable of aiding him in his work; but this is simply make-believe, he well knows that it is impossible. "When one is young," he said, "when the nerves are not yet fatigued, and one writes scores with a certain ease, even that of Lohengrin, without knowing all the resources of coloring and combination, the work is not comparable to that which the new works demand, and which must be written at a maturer age. Auber, however, wrote until his eighty-fourth year without fatigue; but he had not changed his manner." Liszt relates a speech of Auber's, to whom a young musician of great promise had been presented. "Are we not enough already?" cried the master. He afterwards spoke of a counterbass with five chords, the object of which is to descend still further in the lower notes than the ordinary counterbass does. Wagner said of a gentleman who came to submit a similar process to him, that he sent him about his business. Mendelssohn, however, has already tried