The letters from Italy and Switzerland were written during the two years with which he prefaced his quarter-century of labor as composer, director, and virtuoso. They relate much to Italian painting, the music of Passion Week, Swiss scenery, his stay with Goethe, and his brilliant reception in England on his return. They disclose a youth of glorious promise. The second series does not disappoint that promise. The man is the youth a little less exuberant, a little more mature, but no less buoyant, tender, and loving. The letters are as varied as the claims of one's family differ from those of the outside world, but are always Mendelssohnian,--free, pure, unworldly, yet deep and wise. They continue down to the very close of his life. They are edited by his brother Paul, and another near relative. Yet unauthorized publications of other letters will follow, for Mendelssohn was a prolific letter-writer; and Lampadius, a warm admirer of the composer, has recently announced such a volume. The public may rejoice in this; for Mendelssohn was not only purity, but good sense itself; he needs no critical editing; and if we may yet have more strictly musical letters from his pen, the influence of the two volumes now under notice will be largely increased. It is not enough to say of these volumes that they are bright, piquant, genial, affectionate; nor is it enough to speak of their artistic worth, the subtile appreciation of painting in the first series, and of music in the second; it is not enough to refer to the glimpses which they give of eminent artists,--Chopin, Rossini, Donizetti, Hiller, and Moscheles,--nor the side-glances at Thorwaldsen, Bunsen, the late scholarly and art-loving King of Prussia, Schadow, Overbeck, Cornelius, and the Duesseldorf painters; nor is it enough to dwell upon that delightful homage to father and mother, that confiding trust in brother and sisters, that loyalty to friends. The salient feature of these charming books is the unswerving devotion to a great purpose; the careless disregard, nay, the abrupt refusal, of fame, unless it came in an honest channel; the naive modesty that made him wonder, even in the very last years of his life, that _he_ could be the man whose entrance into the crowded halls of London and Birmingham should be the signal of ten minutes' protracted cheering; the refusal to set art over against money; the unwillingness to undertake the mandates of a king, unless with the cordial acquiescence of his artistic conscience; and the immaculate purity, not alone of his life, but of his thought. How he castigates Donizetti's love of money and his sloth! how his whip scourges the immorality of the French opera, and his whole soul abhors the sensuality of that stage! how steadfastly he refuses to undertake the composition of an opera till the faultless libretto for which he patiently waited year after year could be prepared! We wish our religious societies would call out a few of the letters of this man and