The day after I accompanied the Hensels to Delitzsch, Chopin was here; he intended to remain only one day, so we spent this entirely together and had a great deal of music.  I cannot deny, dear Fanny, that I have lately found that you do not do him justice in your judgment [of his talents]; perhaps he was not in a right humour for playing when you heard him, which may not unfrequently be the case with him.  But his playing has enchanted me anew, and I am persuaded that if you and my father had heard some of his better pieces played as he played them to me, you would say the same.  There is something thoroughly original and at the same time so very masterly in his piano-forte-playing that he may be called a really perfect virtuoso; and as every kind of perfection is welcome and gratifying to me, that day was a most pleasant one, although so entirely different from the previous ones spent with you Hensels.

I was glad to be once more with a thorough musician, not with those half-virtuosos and half-classics who would gladly combine in music les honneurs de la vertu et les plaisirs du vice, but with one who has his perfect and well-defined genre [Richtung].  To whatever extent it may differ from mine, I can get on with it famously; but not with those half-men.  The Sunday evening was really curious when Chopin made me play over my oratorio to him, while curious Leipzigers stole into the room to see him, and how between the first and second parts he dashed off his new Etudes and a new Concerto, to the astonishment of the Leipzigers, and I afterwards resumed my St. Paul, just as if a Cherokee and a Kaffir had met and conversed.  He has such a pretty new notturno, several parts of which I have retained in my memory for the purpose of playing it for Paul’s amusement.  Thus we passed the time pleasantly together, and he promised seriously to return in the course of the winter if I would compose a new symphony and perform it in honour of him.  We vowed these things in the presence of three witnesses, and we shall see whether we both keep our word.  My works of Handel [Footnote:  A present from the Committee of the Cologne Musical Festival of 1835.] arrived before Chopin’s departure, and were a source of quite childish delight to him; but they are really so beautiful that I cannot sufficiently rejoice in their possession.

Although Mendelssohn never played any of Chopin’s compositions in public, he made his piano pupils practise some of them.  Karasowski is wrong in saying that Mendelssohn had no such pupils; he had not many, it is true, but he had a few.  A remark which Mendelssohn once made in his peculiar naive manner is very characteristic of him and his opinion of Chopin.  What he said was this:  “Sometimes one really does not know whether Chopin’s music is right or wrong.”  On the whole, however, if one of the two had to complain of the other’s judgment, it was not Chopin but Mendelssohn, as we shall see farther on.