It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before uproarious multitudes.  Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with him.

“They carry me in triumph,” he wrote to Caroline:  “they watch for every wink to do me kindnesses.  But I feel I can only be happy there, where I can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome.”

In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home.  “I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve,” he wrote, “But that I never cease to do.  All my labours are for you—­all my joy is with you.”  “Can I but be with you on New Year’s eve,” he wrote again, with that tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character, “I shall be with you all the year.”

Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from pauperdom.  Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease; hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt that he must not shrink from this final goal.  As his son writes with aching heart in the biography: 

“To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony:  ’Whether I can or no, I must.  Money must be made for my family—­money, man.  I am going to London to die there.  Not a word!  I know it as well as you.’  The bright, cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his ‘Freischuetz,’ was already dead and gone.

“Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most punctilious manner.  The presentiment of the fast-approaching end rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew.  During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find strength sufficient for his journey.  His form sank together:  his voice was almost totally gone:  his cough was incessant.

“In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, ’Don’t take it ill, good people, if I drop asleep:  indeed I cannot help it.’

“And his head would fall upon his breast.  His poor wife suffered cruel agonies:  she could not but feel that he was really spending the small remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children.  She manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to this intent had failed.  But the response was ever the same sad one.