Most memorable of all were our meetings with Peter Cornelius, who also lived in the Lennestrasse.  When I think of him it always seems as if he were looking me in the face.  Whoever once gazed into his eyes could never forget them.  He was a little man, with waxen-pale, and almost harsh, though well-formed features, and smooth, long, coal-black hair.  He might scarcely have been noticed save for his eyes, which overpowered all else, as the sunlight puts out starlight.  Those eyes would have drawn attention to him anywhere.  His peculiar seriousness and his aristocratic reserve of manner were calculated to keep children at a distance, even to repel them, and we avoided the stern little man whom we had heard belonged to the greatest of the great.  When he and his amiable wife became acquainted with our mother, however, and he called us to him, it is indescribable how his harsh features softened in the intercourse with us little ones, till they assumed an expression of the utmost benevolence, and with what penetrating, I might say fatherly kindness, he talked and even jested with us in his impressive way.  I had the best of it, for my blond curly head struck him as usable in some work of his, and my mother readily consented to my being his model.  So I had to keep still several hours day after day, though I confess, to my shame, that I remember nothing about the sittings except having eaten some particularly good candied fruit.

Even now I smile at the recollection of his making an angel or a spirit of peace out of the wild boy who perhaps just before had been scuffling with the enemy from the flower-cellar.

There was another celebrated inhabitant of the Lennestrasse whose connection with us was still closer than that of Peter Cornelius.  It was the councillor of consistory and court chaplain Strauss, who lived at No. 3.

Two men more unlike than he and his great artist-neighbour can hardly be imagined, though their cradles were not far apart, for the painter was born in Dusseldorf, and the clergyman at Iserlohn, in Westphalia.

Cornelius appears to me like a peculiarly delicate type of the Latin race, while Strauss might be called a prototype of the sturdy Lower Saxons.  Broad-shouldered, stout, ruddy, with small but kindly blue eyes, and a resonant bass voice suited to fill great spaces, he was always at his ease and made others easy.  He had a touch of the assured yet fine dignity of a well-placed and well-educated Catholic prelate, though combined with the warlike spirit of a Protestant.

Looking more closely at his healthy face, it revealed not only benevolent amiability but superior sense and plain traces of that cheery elasticity of soul which gave him such power over the hearts of the listening congregation, and the disposition and mind of the king.

His religious views I do not accept, but I believe his strictly orthodox belief was based upon conviction, and cannot be charged to any odious display of piety to ingratiate himself with the king.  It was in the time of our boyhood that Alexander von Humboldt, going once with the king to church, in Potsdam, in answer to the sneering question how he, who passed for a freethinker at court, could go to the house of God, made the apt reply, “In order to get on, your Excellency.”