Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

i68 MY MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
Henselt was distinguished-looking ; she had a manner
suggestive of court circles, in which she must have
been a prominent figure ; and there was beneath all
this a tender pathos, an air of intense repression
the reserve of a proud soul that will not confess its
pain. Henselt, looking at him quite apart from his
genius, at first reminded me of a blunt, unpolished
country gentleman. Later on, I always saw in him
the type of a splendid, tough, sturdy, and uncom-
promising old general; a hater of all shows and
shams ; an enemy to all roundabout speeches, which
not only involve loss of time, but cloud our perceptions
of the truth ; a foe to the knife of all compromises
and half-measures, of all veneer and pretension.
The portrait of their only child (the young of&cer
at whose grave I had been standing an hour before)
faced me as I sat at the dinner-table, and in each of
the three sitting-rooms which opened one into the
other there were portraits of Henselt, which repre-
sented him at all the different periods of life. At
twenty-two, when he was singularly handsome and
attractive-looking ; at forty, when the loss of youth
was compensated for by the depth and intensity of
the glance—the wave-lines of pathos which told that
sorrow and disillusion had been his, and in no scant
measure; then the recent likeness of the 'old lion,'
with a look of war, and an attitude suggestive of one
accustomed to rule—yes, even to the very verge of
despotism.
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