tered the University at Leipzig to study law. The wife of
Professor Carus charmed him by her singing and inspired various songs.
At her house he met the noted piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thus
began an acquaintance of strange vicissitude and strange power for
torment and delight.

Wieck, who was then forty-three, chiefly lived in the career of his
wonder-child, a pianist, Clara Josephine Wieck. She had been born at
Leipzig on September 13, 1819, and was only nine years old, and nine
years younger than Schumann, when they met. She made a sensational
debut in concert the same year. And, child as she was, she excited at
once the keenest and most affectionate admiration in Schumann. He did
not guess then how deeply she was doomed to affect him, but while she
was growing up his heart seemed merely to loaf about till she was ready
for it.

For a time he became Wieck's pupil, hoping secretly to be a pianist,
not a lawyer. He dreamed already of storming America with his
virtuosity.

In 1829, while travelling, he wrote his mother, "I found it frightfully
hard to leave Leipzig at the last. A girl's soul, beautiful, happy, and
pure, had enslaved mine." But this soul was not Clara's. A few months
later, he made a tour through Italy, and wrote of meeting "a beautiful
English girl, who seemed to have fallen in love, not so much with
myself as my piano playing, for all English women love with the head--I
mean they love Brutuses, or Lord Byrons, or Mozart and Raphaels."
Surely one of the most remarkable statements ever made, and
appropriately demolished by the very instances brought to substantiate
it, for, to the best of my knowledge, Mozart, Brutus, and Raphael had
affairs with other than English women; and so did, for the matter of
that, Lord Byron.

A week later Schumann wrote from Venice, whither he had apparently
followed the English beauty:

"Alas, my heart is heavy ... she gave me a spray of cypress when we
parted.... She was an English girl, very proud, and kind, and loving,
and hating ... hard but so soft when I was playing--accursed
reminiscences!"

The wound was not mortal. A little later, and he was showing almost as
much enthusiasm in his reference to his cigars. "Oh, those cigars!" We
find him smoking one at five A.M., on July 30th, at Heidelberg. He had
risen early to write, "the most important letter I have ever written,"
pleading ardently with his mother to let him be a musician. She decided
to leave t