Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/22

8 furiously, and as yet have never broken up before midnight.

To-morrow my portrait will be ready; it will be a large dark drawing in chalks, and a very good likeness, only it makes me look very bearish. Goethe is so friendly and affectionate with me that I know not how to thank him or how to deserve his kindness. In the morning I have to play the piano to him for an hour, pieces from all the great composers arranged in the order of dates, and then explain to him how music has progressed in their hands; meanwhile he sits in a dark corner, like a Jupiter Tonans, and his old eyes flash fire. About Beethoven he was indifferent. But I said he must endure some, and played him the first movement of the symphony in C minor. It affected him very strangely. First he said, “That does not touch one at all, it only astonishes one.” Then he murmured to himself, and said presently, “It is very great, it is wild; it seems as though the house were falling; what must it be with the whole orchestra!” And at dinner, in the middle of a conversation about something else, he began again on the same theme. You know already I dine with him every day, and at those times he asks me searching questions, and after dinner grows so gay and sympathetic that we generally sit together for an hour alone in the room, while he talks without a pause. It is a very especial joy when he shows me his engravings and talks critically about them, or pronounces judgment on Hernani or Lamartine’s Elegies, or on theatrical matters, or on pretty girls. On several evenings he