he decision concerning her son's future to Wieck, who,
knowing Schumann's attainments and promise, voted for music. Schumann,
wild with delight and ambition, fled from Heidelberg and the law. He
went to Mainz on a steamer with many English men and women, and he
writes his mother, "If ever I marry, it will be an English girl." He
did not know what was awaiting him in the home of Wieck, whose house he
entered as pupil and lodger, almost as a son.

Here he worked like a fiend at his theory and practice. He suffered
from occasional attacks of the most violent melancholy, obsessions of
inky gloom, which kept returning upon him at long intervals. But when
he threw off the spell, he was himself again, and could write to his
mother of still new amours:

"I have filled my cup to the brim by falling in love the day before
yesterday. The gods grant that my ideal may have a fortune of 50,000."

In 1830 he flirted with the beautiful Anita Abegg; her name suggested
to him a theme for his Opus I, published in 1831, and based upon the
notes A-B-E-G-G. He apologised to his family for not dedicating his
first work to them, but explained that it was not good enough. It is
published with an inscription to "Pauline, Comtesse d'Abegg," a
disguise which puzzled his family, until he explained that he himself
was the "father" of the "Countess" d'Abegg.

It was two years before he confessed another flirtation. In 1833, he
went to Frankfort to hear Paganini, and there it was a case of "pretty
girl at the willow-bush--staring match through opera-glasses--champagne."
The next year he was torn between two admirations. One, the daughter of
the German-born American consul at Liepzig,--her name was Emily List;
she was sixteen, and he described her "as a thoroughly English girl, with
black sparkling eyes, black hair, and firm step; and full of intellect,
and dignity, and life."

The other was Ernestine von Fricken, daughter--by adoption, though this
he did not know--of a rich Bohemian baron. Of her he wrote:

"She has a delightfully pure, child-like mind, is delicate and
thoughtful, deeply attached to me and everything artistic, and
uncommonly musical--in short just such a one as I might wish to have
for a wife; and I will whisper it in your ear, my good mother, if the
Future were to ask me whom I should choose, I would answer
unhesitatingly, 'This one,' But that is all in the dim distance; and
even now I renounce the prospect of a more intimate r