d semi-breves was the _Philistines_,
which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc.,
for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.
"Young Germany" was making itself felt in all cooerdinate directions:
forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,--a sharp and
spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and
Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality
brought together in Kuehne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who
talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz
Schubert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the
friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo." This was
the _Davidsbund_, or League of David (the last of the "Scenes Mignonnes"
is named "Marche des _Davidsbuendler_ contre les Philistines"). An
agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a fine
sketch of this company, which we will quote.

"The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle
age, intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty
remarks. He was the instructor of more than one of the young musicians
around him, who all listened to his observations with profound
attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the conversation and
suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young, highly
promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain
consciousness of having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl
of fourteen, into a prodigy, whose first appearance delighted the whole
world, and whose subsequent artist-activity became the pride of her
native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a quiet, thoughtful young man of
twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a student in Heidelberg,
he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to Leipsic and
was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be
melancholy. After long struggles, he had only been able to devote
himself entirely to music comparatively late in life, and had been
obliged to pass a part of his precious youth in studies which were as
uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had finally decided for
the career of a _virtuoso_, and was pursuing the study of the piano with
an almost morbid