Born beneath southern skies, brought up in his very early childhood in Italian cities, these influences engraved themselves deeply, indelibly upon his nature. The mother’s blood streaked every thought, every impulse, with a mixture of passion and indolence, fire and superstition. That mother had been the beautiful daughter of an old, impoverished Sicilian house—a house which had never before married out of its own nation and its own sphere. To her son she bequeathed her own hereditary tendencies—she had had much of the indolence, all the superstition of that glorious, yet degraded race of Magna Græcia. In after-days, when Jerome looked up into the murky skies of Lancashire—those skies which gloomed over the grey walls of his father’s house—those deep, unspeakably blue heavens whose glory bathed the marbles of Venice, the quays of Naples, the ruins of Rome, the pictures of Florence, whose glamour lent itself to the whispering, rustling grey of the olives on Mediterranean coast terraces, and made the yellow sand more yellow, the blue sea more deeply violet, the white sail more dazzling—this remembered heaven used to rush to his recollection with a light that was almost lurid, and scattered tones of a speech that was music seemed to ring melodiously in his ears. Italy had faded, yet her finger-mark remained ineffaceable upon his innermost heart, as his mother’s beauty remained upon earth, stamped in the beauty of his own face and the melody of his voice, which, so long as voice or feature remained, should visibly and audibly attest the presence upon earth of a land where skies are warmer, where love is fiercer, where passions run more quickly into white-hot rages than in this humid isle of ours. Another influence had been almost as strong as that of Italy—as strong as any influence which is not already in a man’s natural tendencies can be—and that influence was Germany. After a brief stay in England, during which his father’s second marriage had taken place, he had been sent to the gymnasium of ——, where he had gone through all the courses, and, besides the regular school-training, had been trained also in the school of music. In that land his voice and his musical powers formed a passport. By degrees, the Italian ditties, with their oily sweetness, slipped away, as they have the trick of doing, from his tongue, and the rougher, deeper songs of the Fatherland grew at home there. Casting himself with eagerness into the art, he grew more and more devoted to it, and but for one thing he often felt as if he would never care to leave this _Deutschland_, this home of mighty harmonies, this adopted country. That one thing was the remembrance of his home itself—of the weird, ancient Abbey, with its dark, quaint gardens, its cloisters beside the river; and the still more ancient church which he dimly remembered.