incubator of piano exercises, while Chopin so fused the technical
problem with the poetic idea, that such a nature as the old
pedagogue's must have been unattractive to him. He knew Franz,
Lachner and other celebrities and seems to have enjoyed a mild
flirtation with Leopoldine Blahetka, a popular young pianist, for
he wrote of his sorrow at parting from her. On August 19 he left
with friends for Bohemia, arriving at Prague two days later.
There he saw everything and met Klengel, of canon fame, a still
greater canon-eer than the redoubtable Jadassohn of Leipzig.
Chopin and Klengel liked each other. Three days later the party
proceeded to Teplitz and Chopin played in aristocratic company.
He reached Dresden August 26, heard Spohr's "Faust" and met
capellmeister Morlacchi--that same Morlacchi whom Wagner
succeeded as a conductor January 10, 1843--vide Finck's "Wagner."
By September 12, after a brief sojourn in Breslau, Chopin was
again safe at home in Warsaw.

About this time he fell in love with Constantia Gladowska, a
singer and pupil of the Warsaw Conservatory. Niecks dwells
gingerly upon his fervor in love and friendship--"a passion with
him" and thinks that it gives the key to his life. Of his
romantic friendship for Titus Woyciechowski and John Matuszynski-
-his "Johnnie"--there are abundant evidences in the letters. They
are like the letters of a love-sick maiden. But Chopin's purity
of character was marked; he shrank from coarseness of all sorts,
and the Fates only know what he must have suffered at times from
George Sand and her gallant band of retainers. To this
impressionable man, Parisian badinage--not to call it anything
stronger--was positively antipathetical. Of him we might indeed
say in Lafcadio Hearn's words, "Every mortal man has been many