ificent mind.

He was also distracted by hearing one eternal note ringing in his
ears--the same horror that drove the composer Smetana mad, after he had
embodied the nightmare in one of his compositions. Clara herself in
later life was long distressed by hearing a continual pattern of
"sequences" in her head, and Bizet's early death was a release from two
notes that dinned his ears interminably.

Schumann's eccentricities became a proverb. Alice Mangold Diehl tells
of meeting Robert and Clara, and finding him peevish and her a model of
meekness and patience. Poor Schumann realised his failings and his own
danger, and often suggested retirement to an asylum. But the idea was
too ghastly to endure.

On February 27, 1854, after an especial attack of the bewilderment and
helpless terror that thrilled him, he stole away unobserved, and leaped
from a bridge into the Rhine. He was saved by boatmen and taken home.
He recovered, but it was now thought best that he should be placed
under restraint, and he passed his last two years in a private asylum,
near Bonn. Periods of complete sanity, when he received his friends and
wrote to them, alternated with periods of absolute despair. Under the
weight of his affliction, his soul, like Giles Corey's body in the
Salem witchcraft times, was gradually crushed to death, and at the age
of forty-six he died. Clara, who had been away on a concert tour to
earn much-needed funds, hastened back from London just in time to give
him her own arms as his resting-place in his last agony.

After his funeral she and her children went to Berlin to live with
her mother. She found it necessary to travel as a performer and
to teach until 1882, when her health forbade her touring longer.
She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even as
Schumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatest
ambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had been
also the perfect helpmeet to his art.

Schumann's music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and it
is to Clara Wieck's eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumann
to write this music, and gave him her support under the long
discouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to his
best ideals; but that she travelled through Europe and promulgated his
art, until with her own power of intellect and persuasion she had
coaxed and compelled the world to understand its right value, and his
great mess