seventeen-year-oldish they sound!

"Oh, friend! were I but a smile, how would I flit about her eyes! ...
were I but joy, how gently would I throb in all her pulses! yea, might
I be but a tear, I would weep with her, and then, if she smiled again,
how gladly would I die on her eyelash, and gladly, gladly, be no more."

"My past life lies before me like a vast, vast evening landscape, over
which faintly quivers a rosy kiss from the setting sun."

He bewails two dissipated ideals. One, named "Liddy," "a narrow-minded
soul, a simple maiden from innocent Eutopia; she cannot grasp an idea."
And yet she was very beautiful, and if she were "petrified," every
critic would pronounce her perfection. The boy sighs with that
well-known senility of seventeen:

"I think I loved her, but I knew only the outward form in which the
roseate tinted fancy of youth often embodies its inmost longings. So I
have no longer a sweetheart, but am creating for myself other ideals,
and have in this respect also broken with the world."

Again he looks back upon his absorbing passion for a glorious girl
called "Nanni," but that blaze is now "only a quietly burning sacred
flame of pure divine friendship and reverence."

A month after this serene resignation he goes to Dresden, and finds his
heart full of longing for this very "Nanni." He roves the streets
looking under every veil that flutters by him in the street, in the
hope that he might see her features; he remembers again "all the hours
which I dreamed away so joyfully, so blissfully in her arms and her
love." He did not see her, but later, to his amazement, he stumbles
upon the supposedly finished sweetheart "Liddy." She is bristling with
"explanations upon explanations." She begs him to go up a steep mountain
alone with her. He goes "from politeness, perhaps also for the sake of
adventure." But they are both dumb and tremulous and they reach the peak
just at sunset. Schumann describes that sunset more gaudily than ever
chromo was painted. But at any rate it moved him to seize Liddy's hand
and exclaim, somewhat mal-a-propos: "Liddy, such is our life."

He plucked a rose and was about to give it to her when a flash of
lightning and a cloud of thunder woke him from his dreams; he tore the
rose to pieces, and they returned home in silence.

In 1828, at Augsburg, he cast his affectionate eyes upon Clara von
Kurer, the daughter of a chemist; but found her already engaged. It was
now that he en