Selected letters of Mendelssohn/Letter 32
TO GENERAL VON WEBER, BERLIN.
Even in the depth of my grief your letter has done me good. Your very handwriting first and your nearness to me at this moment is helpful, and then so also is every single word you write. Take my thanks for it, dear and faithful friend. Truly, one who has ever known my sister can never again forget her in a lifetime. But to us, and perhaps most of all to myself, to whom she was present with all her sweetness and affection at every moment, who could have no joy alone but only with the thought of her partaking in it, whom she from the first so helped and spoiled with all the richness of her sisterly love, and who always dreamed that this could never fail, it is a loss which we cannot yet measure at all, and even now I cannot help instinctively believing that our sorrow will be suddenly revoked. Yet I know it is all true, and the certainty is there, but now I cannot accustom myself to it, nor ever shall. It is beautiful to think of that noble, harmonious being, and how she is freed from the weariness of age and the decline of life, but it is hard for us to go on our way with true humility and endurance.
Pardon me that I can write so little, but, thank you, I must. My family are well, their happy children's faces with the unbroken gladness on them, are what has done me good in these days. I cannot think of music; if I turn my thoughts to it, it all seems waste and hollow. But when my children come in, a brightness comes with them, and then I can listen to them and watch them for hours.
The best of thanks for your letter. Heaven keep you and yours.
- ↑ After the death of Fanny Hensel.