“I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the children, who are playing with their ‘dear Johann.’  The omnibus to Koenigstein passes here twice every day.  We have early strawberries for breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the evening, and by ten we are all asleep.  The country is covered with pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons; the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as Punch does with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure Rhenish air,—­this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!”

Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle: 

“The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful.  Now, Marie is learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger!  Now, Paul tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his own.  Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their slices of bread and jam—­’A good idea for an architect,’ At ten Carl comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and geography—­and so on.  ‘And,’ to sum up, ’the best part of every pleasure is gone if Cecile is not there,’ His wife is always somewhere in the picture.”

Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery.  Stratton describes the strange reward of his art as follows: 

“Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were soon deep in the mysteries of children’s clothing, dietary, ailments, and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.  Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of his own Germany.”

On one of the home festivals, Cecile and her sister gave and acted a comic dialogue between two ladies’ maids, in Frankfort dialect.  Gradually, however, Mendelssohn’s overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous vitality and vivacity.  In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands dropped from the keys, and she was dead.  The news was told to Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless; it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain.  From this time on he was a changed man, weary of everything.  He sank gradually until, the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of his wife, his brother, and three friends.