ughter more ambitiously
than judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have
survived the tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no
childhood: at the piano she was kept through all the bright days, roving
only from scale to scale, when she should have been roving from flower
to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she entered into
her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which
were mosses beneath them. From this training she came before the best
audience in Germany, and stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen
summers, and by acclamation was crowned the Queen of the Piano. Franz
Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and many years afterward
wrote in his extravagant way,--"When we heard Clara Wieck in Vienna,
fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks
and lifted by delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets."
At her performance of Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was
inspired to write the following verses:--

"A weird magician, weary of the world,
In sullen humor locked his charms all up
Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
And threw the key into the sea, and died.
The manikins here tried with all their might;
In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
Who with white fingers guides them in her play."

The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child
was the young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first
appearance, he wrote,--"Others make poetry,--she is a poem." And soon
afterward,--"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
up,--the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."

From this moment there was an elasticity and purpos