ers-crosses of the artist and the mountebank — intrigued against him, and stole his music and prevented the recognition of his merit. While he saw persons of not a tithe of his ability showered with princely rewards, and raised to comfortable appointments by court favor, he was forced to waste his fine talent in procuring the mere necessities of life in the drudgery of music-teaching, concert-playing, and compositions (but such compositions!) for the public gardens. It is true, his career was not without its gleams of sunshine-in the noble friendship and appreciation of Haydn-in the love of a most indulgent wife-in the plaudits of the concert room, and the theatre-and in the deep free expression of himself in a symphony, a concerto, a mass, or a Don Giovanni. But whether in sunshine or shade, he was ever the same kindly, magnanimous, hard-working, lovable, and wonderful creature. He never cringed to the great, in his deepest distresses, and he never forgot his humble friends in his highest prosperity. When, at last, his real position was beginning to be recognized-when the Figaro, the Don Giovanni, the Zauberflöte, and the Clemenza di Tito were about to convince the world of what Joseph Haydn had long before said, that he was the greatest composer that had ever lived," the recognition came too late. The hard struggle with misfortune had already reacted into excesses of indulgence-into those snares which pleasure baits for the too weary sons of toil and despair-and the seeds of disease blossomed into the lilies of death. He was carried off in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The "Requiem," his last work, so strangely ordered, was performed at his own funeral.

Posterity has avenged the neglect of Mozart's contemporaries, by assigning him his true place in the ranks of fame. For fertility of invention, for wealth of melody, for piquant chromatic harmonies, for flexibility and brilliancy of expression, for refinement and delicacy of sentiment, for spontaneous grace and beauty, for deep, sad, sweet, pathetic tenderness, for original and exhaustless inspiration,-it has decreed that Mozart is thus far without a rival,—the master of the lyric drama,-incomparably in advance of all the composers in that style that had preceded him, and only equaled in more modern times by one

or two, at most. For sixty years now his operas have been the delight of every stage of the civilized world, while his minor pieces have penetrated to every music-hall and garden, and palace and cottage. Oh! to what millions of men his genius has given hours of the purest and most rapturous delight! What a perennial freshness and charm in his works! What a delicious fragrance is breathed from this atmosphere which he once breathed, and how the thought of what he was and did kindles the heart into a warm and holy glow! Yet in recalling his history he seems hardly a man, rather a divine impersonation of art, an embodied tone, or fountain of tones,-whose life was not upon earth, but amid the etherealities of the creative sphere. Salzburg seems a fitting material type of the grace and beauty and brilliancy in which his spirit lived.

There seems to me great fitness in the comparison between Mozart and Raphael. They were alike in the character of their genius, in personal temperament, and in destiny. The same youthful ripeness, the same easy, almost unconscious command of the deepest secrets of their arts, the same freehearted gaiety, the same deep love and tenderness, the same wild animal enjoyment in the midst of a simple child-like piety, the same unapproachable grace in whatever they touched, and the same sad early death. It might be easy to select out of the pictures of Raphael and the compositions of Mozart, a series of companion-pieces, in which these eminent masters have expressed, each in his way, the same lofty and noble sentiments; while in the St. Cecilia of the former, in which he poured forth his whole conception of the world of harmony and sound, he seems to have foreshadowed the mysterious depth and wondrous richness of the magic art of the latter. It brings before us, in visible shape, the total activity of Mozart's life, a ravishing sentiment of beauty and devotion, bursting forth into song, which the whole earth (represented by the figures of St. Paul, the Magdalene, etc.) reverberates and echoes, and a chorus of child-like angels in the clouds, carries off to the dazzling unisons of Heaven. Nor are the broken and scattered instruments of the foreground without their significance, in the disappointed hopes and thwarted aims of the poor earthly life of the artist.

In the afternoon we visited the Mirabel Palace one of the former pleasurehouses of Wolf Dietrich, and also of the late King Ludwig, of Bavaria—an exceedingly neat and graceful structure, in one of the prettiest squares that can be imagined. We also ascended the Capuchin Hill, on the same side of the river, where the cloisters and gardens of the Capuchin monks are built, giving a glorious out-look over both town and country. In returning, about half way down we stopped at the Church of St. John, which is chiefly remarkable for the fact that the place in which it stands was once visited by John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist themselves. In the year 1487 these illustrious personages came to the gate of Salzburg and demanded admission; but the warder and burgomaster were not quite satisfied with their appearance. They were shabbily dressed, and the one gave himself out as a stone-mason of Nazareth, and the other as a torch-maker of Galilee. The burgomaster, saying that there were plenty of that sort in Salzburg already, drove them away; but a servant of the warder, who had heard their story, took pity on them, and promised them shelter in a little hut he proposed to build on the hill. Thereupon the wanderers dropped their beggar clothes, and revealed to the astonished gaze of the servant the glorified forms of the two Johns. They blessed him and disappeared, and afterwards the Church was erected on the spot on which the hut was to have been raised, to commemorate the holy apparition.

Not far off is another church of some interest, called St. Sebastian's Church, in whose cemetery the bones of Paracelsus repose. It is doubted by some whether this distinguished alchemist and philosopher died in Salzburg, though

the inhabitants point out the very house in which the event is said to have occurred, and it is very sure that a white marble monument in the vestibule of this church has this inscription in Latin: "Reader! Under this pyramid lies PHILIP THEOPHRASTUS, celebrated for his chemical science and the so-called Philosopher's Stone; his bones, at the building of the new church, in 1752, were dug up and deposited here, to remain until the resurrection shall again clothe them with the flesh!" The little bound guide-book is quite indignant that History should have recorded Paracelsus as a mere charlatan and quack, and not as one of the great minds and beneficent characters of his day. I quite share in the feeling. It is true that he participated in the superstitions of his contemporaries-that he was misled by the scientific errors of the 16th century-that he sought the Philosopher's Stone, and even gave out that he had discovered it-that he believed in the influence of the stars upon human destiny, and was a devotee of magic; but he was an aspiring, noble soul, notwithstanding all that—a genuine pioneer in the cause of the natural sciences, and a genial as well as sagacious philosopher.

Modern science, or, at least, its most illustrious teachers - Comte, Liebig, Faraday, etc.-are beginning to do justice to the historical importance of the alchemists and their researches. Though they sought for truth in a wrong direction, their labors were incidentally valuable to the progress of knowledge, and were inspired by a fine instinct. Indeed, the curious phenomena of chemistry, called allotropism, isomerism, and isomorphism, almost persuade one that the transmutation of the common metals into gold was not an impossible hope.

to Prue a branch of magnolia blossoms, with Mr. Bourne's kindest regards, and she put them upon the mantle, and our little house smelled of Italy for a week. The incident developed Prue's Italian tastes, which I had not suspected to be so strong. I found her looking very often at the magnolias; even holding them in her hand, and standing before the mantle with a pensive air. I suppose she was thinking of Beatrice Cenci, or of Tasso and Leonora, or of the wife of Marino Faliero, or of some other of those sad old Italian tales of love and woe. So easily Prue went to Italy!

Thus the spring comes in my heart as well as in the air, and leaps along my veins as well as through the trees. I immediately travel. An orange takes me to Sorrento, and roses, when they blow, to Pestum. The camelias in Aurelia's hair bring Brazil into the happy rooms she treads, and she takes me to South America as she goes to dinner. The pearls upon her neck make me free of the Persian gulf. Upon her shawl, like the Arabian prince upon his carpet, I am transported to the vales of Cashmere; and thus, as I daily walk in the bright spring days, I go round the world.

But the season wakes a finer longing, a desire that could only be satisfied if the pavilions of the clouds were real, and I could stroll among the towering splendors of a sultry spring evening. Ah! if I could leap those flaming battlements that glow along the west-if I could tread those cool, dewy, serene isles of sunset, and sink with them into infinite starlight.

I say so to Prue, and my wife smiles. "But why is it so impossible, if you go to Italy upon a magnolia branch?”

The smile fades from her eyes. "I went a shorter voyage than that," she answered; "it was only to Mr. Bourne's."

I walked slowly out of the house and overtook Titbottom as I went. He smiled gravely as he greeted me, and said:

"I have been asked to invite you to join a little pleasure party."

"Where is it going?"

"Oh! anywhere," answered Titbot

tom.

"And how?"

"Oh! anyhow," he replied.

"You mean that everybody is to go wherever he pleases, and in the way he

best can.

My dear Titbottom, I have long belonged to that pleasure party, although I never heard it called by so agreeable a name before."

My companion said only:

"If you would like to join, I will introduce you to the party. I cannot go, but they are all on board."

I answered nothing; but Titbottom drew me along. We took a boat and put off to the most extraordinary craft I have ever seen. We approached her stern, and, as I curiously looked at it, I could think of nothing but an old picture that hung in my father's house. It was of the Flemish school, and represented the rear view of the row of a burgomaster, going to market. The wide yards were stretched like elbows, and even the studding-sails were spread. The hull was seared and blistered, and in the tops I saw what I supposed to be strings of turnips or cabbages, little round masses, with tufted crests; but Titbottom assured me they were sailors.

We rowed hard, but came no nearer the vessel. "She is going with the tide and wind," said I; "we shall never catch her."

My companion said nothing.

66

But why have they set the studdingsails?" asked I.

"She never takes in any sail," answered Titbottom.

"The more fool she," thought I, a little impatiently, angry at not getting any nearer to the vessel. But I did not say it aloud. I would as soon have said it to Prue as to Titbottom. The truth is, I began to feel uncomfortably from the motion of the boat, and remembered, with a shade of regret, Prue and peppermint. If wives could only keep their husbands a little nauseated, I am confident they might be very sure of their constancy.

But, somehow, the strange ship was gained, and I found myself among as singular a company as I have ever seen. There were men of every country, and costumes of all kinds. There was an indescribable mistiness in the air, or a premature twilight, in which all the figures looked ghostly and unreal. The ship was of a model such as I had never seen, and the rigging had a musty odor, so that the whole craft smelled like a ship-chandler's shop grown mouldy. The figures glided rather than walked about, and I perceived a strong smell of cabbage issuing from the hold.

But the most extraordinary thing of all was, the sense of resistless motion which possessed my mind the moment my foot struck the deck. I could have sworn we were dashing through the water at the rate of twenty knots an hour. (Prue has a great, but a little ignorant, admiration of my technical knowledge of nautical affairs and phrases.) I looked aloft and saw the sails taut with a stiff breeze, and I heard a faint whistling of the wind in the rigging, but very faint, and rather, it seemed to me, as if it came from the creak of cordage in the ships of Crusaders; or of quaint old craft upon the Spanish main, echoing through remote yearsso far away it sounded.

Yet I heard no orders given; I saw no sailors running aloft, and only one figure crouching over the wheel. He was lost behind his great beard as behind a snow-drift. But the startling speed with which we scudded along did not lift a solitary hair of that beard, nor Idid the old and withered face of the pilot betray any curiosity or interest as to what breakers, or reefs, or pitiless shores might be lying in ambush to destroy us.

Still on we swept; and as the traveler in a night train knows that he is passing green fields, and pleasant gardens, and winding streams, fringed with flowers, and is now gliding through tunnels and darting along the base of fearful cliffs, so I was conscious that we were pressing through various climates and by romantic shores. In vain I peered into the gray twilight mist that folded all. I could only see the vague figures that grew and faded upon the haze, as my eye fell upon them, like the intermittent characters of sympathetic ink when heat touches them.

Now, it was a belt of warm, odorous air in which we sailed, and then cold as the breath of a polar ocean.

The per

fume of new-mown hay and the breath of roses came mingled with the distant music of bells, and the twittering song of birds, and the low surf-like sound of the wind in summer woods. There were all the sounds of pastoral beauty, of a tranquil landscape, such as Prue loves, and which shall be painted as the background of her portrait whenever she sits to any of my many artist friends; and I strained my eyes into the cruel mist that held all that music and that suggested beauty, but I could see no

thing. It was so sweet that I scarcely knew if I cared to see. The very thought of it charmed my senses and satisfied my heart. I smelled and heard the landscape that I could not see.

Then the pungent, penetrating fragrance of blossoming vineyards was wafted across the air; the flowery richness of orange groves, and the sacred odor of crushed bay leaves, such as is pressed from them when they are strewn upon the flat pavement of the streets of Florence, and gorgeous priestly processions tread them under foot. A steam of incense filled the air. I smelled Italy-as in the magnolia from Bourne's garden-and, even while my heart leaped with the consciousness, the odor passed, and a stretch of burning silence succeeded.

It was an oppressive zone of heatoppressive not only from its silence but from the sense of awful, antique forms, whether of art or nature, that were sitting, closely veiled, in that mysterious obscurity. I shuddered as I felt that if my eyes could pierce that mist, or if it should lift and roll away, I should see upon a silent shore low ranges of lonely hills, or mystic figures and huge temples trampled out of history by time.

This, too, we left. There was a rustling of distant palms, the indistinct roar of beasts, and the hiss of serpents. Then all was still again. Only at times the remote sigh of the weary sea, moaning around desolate isles undiscovered, and the howl of winds that had never wafted human voices, but had rung endless changes upon the sound of dashing waters, made the voyage more appalling and the figures around me more fearful.

As the ship plunged on through all the varying zones, as climate and country drifted behind us, unseen in that gray mist, but each, in turn, making that quaint craft, England or Italy, Africa and the Southern seas, I ventured to steal a glance at the motley crew, to see what impression this wild career produced upon them.

They sat about the deck in a hundred listless postures. Some leaned idly over the bulwarks, and looked wistfully away from the ship, as if they fancied they saw all that I inferred but could not see. As the perfume, and sound, and climate, changed, I could see many a longing eye sadden and grow moist, and as the chimes of bells re