Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

HENSELT 179
ship, this absence of all forms and preambles, at once
put all my shyness to flight, and in five minutes after
I had joined him, I was feeling quite at home with
him—indeed, I had rarely if ever been so much at
my ease with anyone in my life before.
For the first part of our walk he spoke but little,
but he seemed to be enjoying both the brisk exercise
and the fresh balmy evening air. I can recall as if it
were yesterday the turn by the corn-field, where we
both stood for a few moments, and gazed in silence
at the setting sun. He asked me, when we continued
our walk, how I liked Warmbrunn, and seemed rather
surprised when I told him that I felt it lonely.
' Have you not your work, and the walks in this
beautiful country ?' was his rejoinder. ' I never feel
lonely, for my ideal is always with me. My ideal,
which I shall never, never attain
—
in der Ewigkeit
nie erreichen tuerde—is more to me than anything or
anybody in the whole world !'
A few days after this he was taken ill, and was for
a fortnight unable to see anyone but his own family,
and though I had only known him for about a month,
I was in the deepest state of anxiety about him ; in-
deed, there were times when I firmly believed that he
would die—that I was doomed to lose one whom I
had already divined would be to me a sort of musical
.father.
The only consolation I had during these first few
days of Henselt's illness was in talking to his house-