The Mendelssohn family had moved to Berlin when Felix was only three years old, and the Berliners always claimed him as their own.  Strange to say, the city of his birth did not recognize his talent for many years.  At the age of twenty he went to England, and the high breeding, personal beauty, and charming manner of the young musician gave him the entree into the most fastidious and exclusive circles.  His first symphony and the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream” overture stamped his power with the verdict of a warm enthusiasm; for London, though cold and conservative, is prompt to recognize a superior order of merit.

His travels through Scotland inspired Mendelssohn with sentiments of great admiration.  The scenery filled his mind with the highest suggestions of beauty and grandeur.  He afterward tells us that “he preferred the cold sky and the pines of the north to charming scenes in the midst of landscapes bathed in the glowing rays of the sun and azure light.”  The vague Ossianic figures that raised their gigantic heads in the fog-wreaths of clouded mountain-tops and lonely lochs had a peculiar fascination for him, and acted like wine on his imagination.  The “Hebrides” overture was the fruit of this tour, one of the most powerful and characteristic of his minor compositions.  His sister Fanny (Mrs. Hensel) asked him to describe the gray scenery of the north, and he replied in music by improvising his impressions.  This theme was afterward worked out in the elaborate overture.

We will not follow him in his various travels through France and Italy.  Suffice it to say that his keen and passionate mind absorbed everything in art which could feed the divine hunger, for he was ever discontented, and had his mind fixed on an absolute and determined ideal.  During this time of travel he became intimate with the sculptor Thorwaldsen, and the painters Leopold Robert and Horace Vernet.  This period produced “Walpurgis Night,” the first of the “Songs without Words,” the great symphony in A major, and the “Melusine” overture.  He is now about to enter on the epoch which puts to the fullest test the varied resources of his genius.  To Moscheles he writes, in answer to his old teacher’s warm praise:  “Your praise is better than three orders of nobility.”  For several years we see him busy in multifarious ways, composing, leading musical festivals, concert-giving, directing opera-houses, and yet finding time to keep up a busy correspondence with the most distinguished men in Europe; for Mendelssohn seemed to find in letter-writing a rest for his overtaxed brain.

In 1835 he completed his great oratorio of “St. Paul,” for Leipsic.  The next year he received the title of Doctor of Philosophy and the Fine Arts; and in 1837 he married the charming Cecile Jean-renaud, who made his domestic life so gentle and harmonious.  It has been thought strange that Mendelssohn should have made so little mention of his lovely wife in his letters, so prone as he was to speak of affairs of his daily life.  Be this as it may, his correspondence with Moscheles, Devrient, and others, as well as the general testimony of his friends, shows us unmistakably that his home-life was blessed in an exceptional degree with intellectual sympathy, and the tenderest, most thoughtful love.