“Go farther! let me leave thee!  I depart!—­
  Who whispered I would linger by thy side? 
  Who said it beat so warm, my feeble heart? 
  Who told, I dared to claim thee as my bride? 
  Who cried, I roamed without thee all the day
  And clasped thee in my dreams?  Away, away,
    Adelaida!

  “I die, but thou shall live; in the loud noon
  Thy feet shall crush the long grass o’er my head,
  Not rudely, rudely,—­gently, gently, soon
  Shall tread me heavier down in that dark bed;
  And thou shalt know not on whose head they pass,
  Whose silent hands, whose frozen heart!—­Alas,
    Adelaida!”

There are those who in “Charles Auchester,” charmed by the simplicity and truth of that first part called “Choral Life,” objected to the rest on the score of extravagance.  But this book records the adoration of music, and in an age replete with the dilettanti of indifference may we not thank God for one enthusiast?  Yet, indeed, everything about Mendelssohn was itself extravagant,—­his childhood, his youth, his life, his beauty, his power:  should the instrument, then, be tuned lower than such key-note?  And again, to us who live a somewhat commonplace routine, the life of musical artists, especially abroad, must necessarily seem redundant; yet it is only that life, natural and actual, into which we are here inducted.  The same is possible to no other class of artists:  even the scholar, buried in his profound studies, must descend from his abstraction; the poet, the painter, cannot share it:  for the latter, however much he clubs and cliques, is seldom sufficiently dispossessed of himself; and the other, though he strike out of his heat poems as immortal as stars, may yet live among clods and feel no thrill returning on himself.  But the musician cannot dwell alone:  his art requires that he should cluster, and the orchestra enforces it; therefore he acts and reacts like the vibrations ridged within a Stradivarius, he is kept in his art’s atmosphere till it becomes his life, its aura bathes every trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised and glorified.  Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the musician’s life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of the author to idealize, one can believe “Charles Auchester” to be but a faithful transcript.  “In proportion to our appreciation of music is also our appreciation of what is not music,” Sarona says; and so faithfully does this writer prove it, by her attention to minute and usual circumstances, that one might certainly allow her some exaltation when touching on one theme,—­yet how this exaltation can be called in question by any who espouse Bettine von Arnim’s sublime ravings the morning after entering Vienna is mysterious.  Were the real condition of these natures—­which certainly exist—­bared to view, many from their phlegmatic experience might deem all the nerves to be in a state