Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/126

116 So they both left us, sire and son,

With opening leaf, with laden bough:

The youth whose race was just begun,

The wearied man whose course was run,

Its record written on his brow,

Are brothers now.

Brothers!—the music of the sound

Breathes softly through my closing strain;

The floor we tread is holy ground,

Those gentle spirits hovering round,

While our fair circle joins again

Its broken chain.

25th, 1864.

knowest not the day nor the hour." Scarcely two years ago the great composer, whose recent death involves so irreparable a loss to the world of musical art, was accosted, while in a Paris coffee-house, by a friend recently arrived from Berlin.

"What do they say of me there?" asked Meyerbeer, after the first salutations.

"They say, with regret, that you are just now as reticent as Rossini."

"Indeed!"

"Yet, after all, they add that you are busier than Rossini, for he is doing nothing, and you, at least, have an opera in your portfolio."

"Ah! I see you are hinting about the 'Africaine.

"Yes, I refer to the 'Africaine.

"Bah! bah! The Parisians are in a great hurry about it. I am not dead yet, and some fine day I will astonish them in a way they will remember."

Providence decreed that this harmless boast, this careless prediction, should come to nought. While he was yet working on the "Africaine", the hand of death interposed, and, at the cold touch, the pen was laid aside, the music-paper dropped unheeded on the floor, the piano was silent, and the composer left forever the scene of his labors and his triumphs. Few men might, at the last hour, be more justified in pleading, with earnest anxiety,—"Not now!—not now!"

Biographers already differ about the date of Meyerbeer's birth, some asserting that it took place in 1791, while the majority agree that the day was September 5, 1794. Born of a rich family of Jewish bankers, he was, at an early age, stimulated to honorable exertion by the success in other pursuits of his brother William, the astronomer, and Michael, the poet,—successes which, however, at this day, are chiefly remembered from their association with the name made really famous by the composer. His parents encouraged the talent of the youth, who, at as early an age as Mozart himself, manifested plainly the possession of genius; and when only five years old, the boy was placed under the instruction of Lanska, a local celebrity of Berlin. Two years later, little Jacob was a fair performer on the piano-forte, or such an instrument as at that time served for the Érard, the Chickering, the Steinway of the present day. He played, as a prodigy, at the most fashionable amateur-concerts given at the Prussian capital; and a faded old