l, big and homely, what an insight you had into the heart
of things, and what a flying-machine your imagination was! Room for many
passengers? Yes, and children especially, for these you loved most of
all, because you were ever only just a big overgrown boy yourself. You
cried your eyes out before your hair grew white, and then a child or a
woman led you about; and thus did you supply Victor Hugo a saying that
can not die: "To be blind and to be loved--what happier fate!"

Yes, Jean Paul used to cry at his work when he wrote well, and I do,
too. I always know when I write particularly well, for at such times I
mop furiously. However, I seldom mop.

Robert Schumann began to write little essays, and the essays were as
near like Jean Paul's as he could make them. He read them to his mother,
just as Jean Paul used to write for his mother and call her "my Gentle
Reader"--he had but one.

Robert's mother believed in her boy--what mother does not? But her love
was not tempered by reason, and in it there was a sentimental flavor
akin to the maudlin.

The father wanted the lad to take up his own business, as German fathers
do, but the mother filled the lad's head with the thought that he was
fit for something higher and better. She was not willing to let the
seed ripen in Nature's way--she thought hothouse methods were an
improvement.

Such a mother's ambition centers in her son. She wants him to do the
thing she has never been able to do. She thirsts for honors, applause,
publicity, and all those things that bring trouble and distress and make
men old before their time.

So we find the boy at eighteen packed off to Heidelberg to study law,
with no special preparation in knowledge of the world, of men or books.
But old father antic, the law, was not to his taste. Robert liked music
and poetry better. His fine, sensitive, emotional spirit found its best
exercise in music; and at the house of Professor Carus he used to sing
with the professor's wife. This Professor Carus, by the way, is, I
believe, directly related to our own Doctor Paul Carus, of whom all
thinking people in America have reason to be proud. I am told that when
a boy of eighteen or nineteen mingles his voice several evenings a week
with that of a married lady aged, say, thirty-five, and they also play
"four hands" an hour or so a day, that the boy is apt to surprise the
married lady by falling very much in love with her. Boys are quite given
to this thing, a