Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/101

Rh when she sings, and to be interested in her melancholy. It is an unpleasant contrast; sometimes when I have been wanted to play something after her, I could not bring myself to it, and let the people go away. Very possibly all this talk will spoil her, for she has no friend to understand or direct her. Besides, she is curiously without musical training, knows little, can scarcely discriminate good music from bad, and, left to herself, thinks everything outside her own songs wonderfully fine. If she once comes to an understanding with herself, it will go well. Meanwhile I have done all I can, that is, most earnestly entreated her parents and herself to avoid soirées and so forth, and not to let anything so divine be wasted. Heaven grant my advice may do some good. Perhaps I may send you some of her songs, things she wrote for me out of gratitude for my teaching her what she already knew naturally, and because I have done a little to attach her to good and serious music.

Besides this, I play the organ for an hour every day; but, unluckily, I can’t get the practice I want, because the pedals are without the five high notes, so that one can’t play a single passage of Seb. Bach’s with it. But there are marvellously fine stops in it, with which one can embellish chorales; and especially, my Fanny, I have found the stops which are wanted for Bach’s “Schmücke dich o liebe Seele.” They seem made for the purpose, and the tone is so thrilling that a kind of shudder runs all through me when I begin. For the florid accompaniment I have an eight-foot flute, and a perfectly soft four-foot, which