hat I meet the warmest expressions
of love with coldness and reserve, and often offend and humiliate
precisely those who are most sincerely devoted to me. Often have I
queried and reproached myself for this, for inwardly I acknowledge
even the most trifling favor, understand every wink, every subtle
trait in the heart of another, and yet I so often blunder in what I
say and do."

In these melancholy moods nature was his refuge and consolation.
He objected to Leipsic because there were no delights of
nature--"everything artificially transformed; no valley, no mountain,
where I might revel in my thoughts; no place where I can be alone,
except in the bolted room, with the eternal noise and turmoil below."
Although he had but a few intimate friends, he was liked by all the
students, and even enjoyed the name of "a favorite of the Heidelberg
public." One of his intimate friends was Flechsig, but even of him he
paradoxically complains that he is too sympathetic: "He never cheers
me up; if I am occasionally in a melancholy mood, he ought not to be
the same, and he ought to have sufficient humanity to stir me up.
That I often need cheering up, I know very well." Yet he was as often
in a state of extreme happiness and enjoyment of life and his
talents. He even, on occasion, indulged in students' pranks. On his
journey to Heidelberg he induced the postilion to let him take the
reins: "Thunder! how the horses ran, and how extravagantly happy I
was, and how we stopped at every tavern to get fodder, and how I
entertained the whole company, and how sorry they all were when I
parted from them at Wiesbaden!!" At Frankfort, one morning, he
writes: "I felt an extraordinary longing to play on a piano. So I
calmly went to the nearest dealer, told him I was the tutor of a
young English lord who wished to buy a grand piano, and then I
played, to the wonder and delight of the bystanders, for three hours.
I promised to return in two days and inform them if the lord wanted
the instrument; but on that date I was at Ruedesheim, drinking
Ruedesheimer." In another place he gives an account of "a scene
worthy of Van Dyck, and a most genial evening" he spent with some
students at a tavern filled with peasants. They had some grog, and at
the request of the peasants one of the students declaimed, and
Schumann played. Then a dance was arranged. "The peasants beat time
with their feet. We were in high spirits, and danced dizzily among
the peasant feet,