“’Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one!  Within a year I am a dead man.  But if I go, my children will have bread, when their father is gone:  if I do not, want may stare them in the face.  What is to be done?’ On one occasion he added, ’I should like to come back once more and see my dear ones’ faces again:  and then, in God’s name, let God’s will be done!  But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!’

“The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of bitter tears, when Weber’s travelling-carriage drove up to his door.  The time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying man.  Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children—­another long lingering kiss—­the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs—­the door was closed—­and he rolled away from home, on that cold winter’s morning, sobbing till the shattered chest might almost burst at once.

“Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:  ‘It is his coffin I have closed upon him!’

“At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own horses.  It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances.  His voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber; and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other’s sorrow.”

Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the whole people over his work.  It was his fate to reach there just after the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of weariness and impatience.  After the first rapturous curiosity of personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but “Der Freischuetz,” and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.

His health, too, was in tragic state.  Frightful spasms and hemorrhages seemed to tear him asunder.  At a dinner given him, two of the guests had to carry him up the stairs.  He was hardly strong enough to stand during the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience.  But the worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart, was his homesickness.  To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he cried: 

“Go! go! no doctor’s tinkering can help me now.  The machine is shattered.  But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!” His effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up.  When she wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long away, he answered: