n honour of him. We vowed these things in the
presence of three witnesses, and we shall see whether we both
keep our word. My works of Handel [Footnote: A present from
the Committee of the Cologne Musical Festival of 1835.]
arrived before Chopin's departure, and were a source of quite
childish delight to him; but they are really so beautiful
that I cannot sufficiently rejoice in their possession.

Although Mendelssohn never played any of Chopin's compositions in
public, he made his piano pupils practise some of them. Karasowski is
wrong in saying that Mendelssohn had no such pupils; he had not many, it
is true, but he had a few. A remark which Mendelssohn once made in his
peculiar naive manner is very characteristic of him and his opinion
of Chopin. What he said was this: "Sometimes one really does not know
whether Chopin's music is right or wrong." On the whole, however, if one
of the two had to complain of the other's judgment, it was not Chopin
but Mendelssohn, as we shall see farther on.

To learn what impression Chopin made on Schumann, we must once more turn
to the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, where we find the Polish artist's
visit to Leipzig twice mentioned:--

October 6, 1835. Chopin was here, but only for a few hours,
which he passed in private circles. He played just as he
composes, that is, uniquely.

The second mention is in the P.S. of a transcendental Schwarmerbrief
addressed by Eusebius (the personification of the gentle, dreamy side of
Schumann's character) to Chiara (Clara Wieck):--

October 20, 1835. Chopin was here. Florestan [the
personification of the strong, passionate side of Schumann's
character] rushed to him. I saw them arm in arm glide rather
than walk. I did not speak with him, was quite startled at
the thought.

On his way to Paris, Chopin stopped also at Heidelberg, where he visited
the father of his pupil Adolph Gutmann, who treated him, as one of his
daughters remarked, not like a prince or even a king, but like somebody
far superior to either. The children were taught to look up to Chopin as
one who had no equal in his line. And the daughter already referred to
wrote more than thirty years afterwards that Chopin still stood out in
her memory as the most poetical remembrance of her childhood and youth.

Chopin must have been back in Paris in the first half or about the
middle of October, for the Gazette musicale of the 18th of that month