London Days

halfway down Sloane Street, on the left-hand side, as you go from Knightsbridge. It stood there till the end of the eighties. If you walked there in the days of my ear

enclosure as a back garden. Probably your neighbour on the 'bus top would tell you, 'bus neighbours being at all times well stocked with misinformation, that the favoured dwelling was the home of

man as ever lived. He was an artist by profession, fond of music and musicians, as you might expect him to be; he spoke several languages fluently and with equal charm-English, French, German, Esperanto, and I know not what else-and he was passionately attached to movements for world peace. We know that nothing made for the peace of the world down to mid-1914; that while Germany had been deceiving it, t

oup in a cosy corner. It was one of the happy points about Moscheles' Sunday afternoons that if you cared to continue talking with another caller and the other caller cared to continue to listen, or to talk with you, you were not routed up to exchange commonplaces about the weather with somebody else who need

Moscheles, at this time, was preparing for publication "Felix Mendelssohn's letters to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles." I had something to do with persuading him to write "In Bohemia with George Du Maurier." I had been looking in his studio through a mass of autograph letters and sketches relating to his years in Paris as an art student, the

t his friend, Moscheles' father, should become a professor in the Conservatoire which he was founding at Leipzig. And so the move was made, Ignaz Moscheles relinquishing his London career and its worldly advantages in order to live near his friend. Felix, who at ten had begun his education at King's College, London, had, at thirteen, to find

Paris he went to Antwerp, where he studied under Van Lorino at De Keyser's Academy, and where he had as fellow students Laurens Alma-Tadema, Maris, and Heyermans. I don

, accompanying his friends Henry Irving and Ellen Terry on their first journey over the Atlantic. He painted Grover Cleveland, during the week when Cleveland was first elected to the Presidency, and talked with him of the subjects which absorbed the artist,-International Arbitration and Universal Peace. His portrait of Browning went to the Armour Institute, Chicago. Other portraits of his which were qu

the painter. They were socialistic pictures, reforming, philanthropic, propagandist, as i

ing and jealous neighbours who might have keys to the gardens but could not live in those pleasant demesnes. In the Elm Park Road, near the borders of Chelsea and Fulham, Moscheles found a house with an unusually large garden. He transformed the house and built a studio which he connected with it, and there one went to so many melodious evenings and artistic afternoons that through the years of recoll

youngster. He was then only a boy. But the music rippled and thundered from his fingers, while that amazing head with its torrential hair cast shivering shadows over th

in remote countries with the object of spreading the merits of Esperanto as an auxiliary language for international intercourse. "Even now," he said a generation ago, "I can go anywhere with it, and by its aid find somebody who will make me feel at home." He was a tireless propagandist. I would venture to say that he l

had killed him I dare say the man deserved it, for, of all the plundering and oppressive gangs of officialdom, the Russians of that era had about the worst; they robbed like desperados and they ruled their land with lies, torture, and corruption. In a country capable of producing the "Revolution" of 1917 and the later Bolshevism, anything was possible in the mid-eighties,-anything except the shadow of freedom. The tall dark Russian with the thin beard and the thin squeaky voice was a striking contrast to Moscheles, who was grey, and rather short than tall,

my spirits as many Swamis have done. I forget his name. I have met regiments of them in one country and another. Mostly they blazed, not with humility but importance. He, I say, had a worldly air, as if he w

y looke

does he share

t," she

mi. And there were

the lady, "that I

rse, was a generation before the suffragettes were brandishing hatchets l

-bye at the old brown-brick bungalow which the Earl of Cadogan was so glad to destroy when the chance arrived to do so, it had been arranged by Moscheles and the poet that we should meet again with another friend of the three at a little lunch of four. But fate, or, to be precis

me the voice of an Irish writer whom I had known and had lost from sight five years before. While looking for the familiar face that belonged to the delicious brogue, there came the sound of

hat the grey light of the dull day, softened by the colouring of the Abbey windows, fell upon. There were tiers of people. Even the openings in the triforium revealed them, and by the great western doors they were packed, though they could catch but glimpses of the chancel, and most of them not that. Huxley's was the first face I saw. I had first seen it in the same place, almost on the same spot, years before, at Darwin's funeral. Max Muller an

Within the Abbey the arches aloft dissolved in mist, a mist of copper and pale gold where t

city perish

armaments in th

orsemen, footme

and choked

u Maurier, Leslie Stephen, William Black, Bancroft, and John Hare, and the publishers Blackwood, Macmillan, Murray, and Spottiswoode, ambassadors and ministers, the heads of universities, of learned societies, were shown to their places, singly or in groups, or took positions where they could find them, standing against the monuments. And when no more pe

am Tennyson, Doctor Butler (of Trinity College, Cambridge), Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Theodore Martin, Archdean Farrar, Professor Masson, Professor Jowett (master of Balliol), Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir James Paget, Sir George Grove, George Murray Smith (Browning's publi

we give to

heart to

tar-tuned ha

voice to tea

crown to lig

His belov

o full of d

wailing in

old, the w

curse that o

a silence th

h His belo

rop mutely

bove it sai

s slopes men

than the d

is floate

His belov

ned. And just then there fell a shaft of sunlight, golden, magical, touching the bier, and then it faded slowly away. To many, very many among the silent company, the loss by this death was a personal one; to all it had

son, Addison and Cowley, Prior, Macaulay and Grote; of Handel, Campbell, Sheridan, and Garrick. I stood on the grave of Dickens. And the throng passed slowly, reverently gazing into the dark grave where Browning's body had been laid as the old year was dying. Pealing through nave and transepts and the chapels of Kings, above the altar and the tombs of soldiers, sailors, statesmen-the brood who had made England and sung of her-the rumbling

me. My earliest memory of music concerns itself with a military band, marching slowly, slowly down a hill, troops following with reversed arms, a gun carriage carrying something that was not a gun, covered with a flag; horses whose riders moved very slowly; coaches that young eyes saw as beyond number; and then a hole-in-the-g

and triumph and sob and victoriously march to the rhythm of the winds, so charged with majesty, as when Sir Frederick touched the heart of his instrument at the Abbey. The oc