"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,' In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cécile." Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the 9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once: "My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel so rich and happy." It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that, when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in "Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano and extemporise upon the theme. Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny Hensel visited them, and found Cécile possessed not only of "the beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and promised to cure him of his irritability." The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously, and regretted being a conductor at all. In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cécile was dangerously ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be married: