he first published his popular “Fancy Tales,” which made his name immortal. Afterwards he published “The Apparitions of Friend Heins,” in 1786. He also published “The Gardener’s Daughter,” a comic opera; “The Four Degrees of Human Age,” a prelude, with music; besides several satires, poems, and critical essays. He commenced a new collection of Tales, under the title of “Ostrich Feathers,” when, after the publication of the first volume, he suddenly died, October the 28th, 1787, at the age of fifty-two, of a disease which is very rare,—the polypus of the heart.
At the latter end of his life he had purchased a country-seat on the Altenberg, near Weimar, which the Duchess Amelia of Saxe Weimar, the great patroness of authors, and herself a poet, had furnished for him.
An unknown hand has erected a monument to him in the cemetery of Weimar, simple as was his life, but full of taste. A similar monument in bas-relief was erected to his memory by his friends in the church of St. Jacob: an urn upon an open book, with the inscription, “To the Immortal Musæus.”
