the quiet walks and shady alleys of the old garden, in the company of congenial friends, surrounded by the spirit of lightness, grace, and affection, that Felix Mendelssohn became acquainted with that airy fantasy and set it to music worthy of it. It was in this year that he composed the overture to the Midsummer-Night's Dream, and so fully did it express the spirit of the play that, when twenty years after he wished to continue the work, he. allowed the overture to remain untouched, not finding it necessary to alter a note in the work of his youth.
At this time, too, and evidently inspired by the same feeling, he set to music, as a birthday present for his friend Rietz, the stanza from the Walpurgis-Night Dream in Faust:
Are lighted from above,
A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds
And all has vanished."
"And he has been really successful," says Fanny, proudly. "To me alone he told his idea: the whole piece is to be played staccato and pianissimo, the tremulandos coming in now and then, the trills passing away with the quickness of lightning; everything new and strange, and, at the same time, most insinuating and pleasing. One feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, and half inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aerial procession. At the end, the first violin takes a flight with feather-like lightness, and—all has vanished."
In the autumn of 1827, the merry Klingemann went to London, and his friends of Leipziger Strasse, No. 3, missed him sadly, although an animated correspondence was kept up between him and Fanny.
"I only wish I were less near-sighted," he writes in his first letter, "especially for the sake of the English ladies.
