's malady returned with double force, and on February
27, 1854, he attempted to end his misery by jumping into the Rhine.
Madness had seized him with a clutch which was never to be released,
except at short intervals. Every possible care was lavished on him by
his heartbroken and devoted wife, and the assiduous attention of the
friends who reverenced the genius now for ever quenched. The last two
years of his life were spent in the private insane asylum at Endenich,
near Bonn, where he died July 20, 1856. Schumann possessed a wealth of
musical imagination which, if possibly equaled in a few instances, is
nowhere surpassed in the records of his art. For him music possessed
all the attributes inherent in the other arts--absolute color and
flexibility of form. That he attempted to express these phases of art
expression, with an almost boundless trust in their applicability to
tone and sound, not unfrequently makes them obscure to the last degree,
but it also gave much of his composition a richness, depth, and subtilty
of suggestive power which place them in a unique niche, and will
always preserve them as objects of the greatest interest to the musical
student. There is no doubt that his increasing mental malady is evident
in the chaotic character of some of his later orchestral compositions,
but, in those works composed during his best period, splendor of
imagination goes hand in hand with genuine art treatment. This is
specially noticeable in the songs and the piano-forte works. Schumann
was essentially lyrical and subjective, though his intellectual breadth
and culture (almost unrivaled among his musical compeers) always kept
him from narrowness as a composer. He led the van in the formation of
that pictorial and descriptive style of music which has asserted itself
in German music, but his essentially lyric personality in his attitude
to the outer world presented the external thoroughly saturated and
modified by his own moods and feelings.

In his piano-forte works we find his most complete and satisfactory
development as the artist composer. Here the world, with its myriad
impressions, its facts, its purposes, its tendencies, met the man and
commingled in a series of exquisite creations, which are true tone
pictures. In this domain Beethoven alone was worthy to be compared with
him, though the animus and scheme of the Beethoven piano-forte works
grew out of a totally different method.

In personal appearance Schumann