edges, and modulating from one mood into another.
Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a good
letter has so necessarily a unity of mood, that musicians, _ex
officio_, tend to write correspondence that is literary without trying
to be so, sincere without stupidity. But in the volumes and volumes of
musicians' letters, which it has been my fortune to read, I have never
found any others which were so ardent and yet so earnest, so throbbing
with longing and yet so full of honesty, so eloquent and so dramatic
with the very highest forms of eloquence and romance as those of Robert
Schumann and Clara Wieck.

The woes of the two lovers were as different as possible, though
equally balanced; and the honourableness of their undertaking was
equally high.

Clara was torn betwixt filial piety toward a father who could be ursine
to a miserable degree, and a lover who was not only eating his heart
out in loneliness, but who needed her personality to complete his
creative powers in music. While Schumann had no such problem to meet,
he lacked Clara's elastic and buoyant nature, and it must never be
forgotten that when he was sad, he was dismal to the point of absolute
madness. He would sit for hours in the company of hilarious
tavern-friends, and speak never a word.

Clara at length gave up her attempt to keep from writing to Schumann,
in the face of her father's actions; for in spite of the promises he
had given them, he could break out in such speeches as this: "If Clara
marries Schumann, I will say it even on my death-bed, she is not worthy
of being my daughter."

Now began that clandestine correspondence which seems to have
implicated and inculpated half the musicians of Europe. There were
almost numberless go-betweens who carried letters for the lovers, or
received them in different towns. There were zealous messengers ranging
from the Russian Prince Reuss-Koestriz, through all grades of society,
down to the devoted housemaid "Nanny." Chopin, and Mendelssohn, and
many another musician, were touched by the fidelity of the lovers, and
Liszt in one of his letters describes how he had broken off
acquaintance with his old friend Wieck, because of indignation at his
treatment of Schumann and Clara.

Schumann's works were now beginning to attract a little attention,
though not much, and even Clara was impelled to beg him to write her
something more in the concert style that the public would understand.
But wh