s life." Already he was very much
interested in the promising girl, and expresses himself concerning her
with much ardor. He seems to have been singularly slow in composition.
At this time, 1833, he had written the first and third movements of
the G minor sonata, had commenced the F minor sonata and completed the
"Toccata," which had been begun four years before. He also arranged
the second set of Paganini's caprices, Opus 10. He found a faithful
friend in Frau Voigt, a pianist of sense and ability. Schumann usually
passed his evenings in a restaurant in company with his friends, after
the German fashion, but while the others talked he usually remained
silent. Frau Voigt told W. Taubert that one lovely summer evening
after making music with Schumann, they both felt inclined to go upon
the water. They sat side by side in the boat for an hour in silence.
At parting Schumann pressed her hand and said, "Good day, we have
perfectly understood one another."

The immediate result of the musical associations of Schumann, in
Leipsic, was the project for a musical journal, devoted to progress
and sincerity. In opera Rossini was then the ruling force. At the
piano Herz and Huenten; and musical journalism was represented by
_Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung_, published by Breitkopf & Haertel,
which praised almost everything, upon general principles. In 1834,
the first number of the _Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik_ saw the light.
The editors were Robert Schumann, Friedrich Wieck, Ludwig Schunke and
Julius Knorr. Schumann was the ruling power, and he proceeded to
develop his literary faculty in a variety of forms. He writes under
many pseudonyms, and has much to say about the "David league against
the Philistines," a society existing in his imagination only. One of
the famous early articles in this paper was that upon Chopin's
variation "_La ci Darem_," greeting the work of the talented young
Pole as a production of rare genius. Schumann himself thought so well
of this article that he placed it at the beginning of his collected
writings. It will be impossible within available limits to define the
influence of this journal. During the ten years when Schumann was
editor, many of the most important productions of the modern school
first saw the light, and all come in for discussion, from a point of
view at the same time sympathetic and intelligent.

As an example of the musical life at Leipsic in this time, Moscheles
mentions an evening i