medley is yet pregnant with historic associations. The composer wrote it in his young days, stringing twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a town of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts frequently strayed, because at that time there was an object there interesting to his sensitive soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must be remembered that the H in German stands for our B natural, and S or es for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" was begun and for ten years edited by Schumann,-in what spirit we may gather from his own words:-"The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and Hünten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole, Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence. One day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,Let us not idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league of music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at which they threw their inkstands and semibreves was the Philistines, which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc., for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities. "Young Germany" was making itself felt in all coördinate directions: forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,-a sharp and spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality brought together in Kühne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz Schu

bert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo." This was the Davidsbund, or League of David (the last of the "Scènes Mignonnes" is named "Marche des Davidsbündler contre les Philistines"). An agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Sonntagsblatt" has given us a fine sketch of this company, which we will quote.

"The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle age, intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty remarks. He was the instructor of more than one of the young musicians around him, who all listened to his observations with profound attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the conversation and suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young, highly promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain consciousness of having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl of fourteen, into a prodigy, whose first appearance delighted the whole world, and whose subsequent artist-activity became the pride of her native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a quiet, thoughtful young man of twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a student in Heidelberg, he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to Leipsic and was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be melancholy. After long struggles, he had only been able to devote himself entirely to music comparatively late in life, and had been obliged to pass a part of his precious youth in studies which were as uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had finally decided for the career of a virtuoso, and was pursuing the study of the piano with an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a consequence of his overexertions, obliged him to give up this career forever. He did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate for him in the end, by directing him to

his true vocation, composition. Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of love, in the garb of admiration for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young Robert so quiet and dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the eccentric Louis Boehner, who long ago had served as the model for E. T. A. Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J. P. Lyser, a painter by profession, but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,-now, in his capacity of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master is wont to claim for himself. C. F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as many more young and old artists of more or less merit and talent." †

Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood that sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of so many future sorrows and glories.

"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys together at Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day, which since has blessed hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone; this breast held his sorrows and his hopes, when he was struggling to reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his madness he cast himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his eyelids when they were closed in death."

Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.

At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out, and was informed that my audience was wait

The "Florestan" of the "Scènes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is Clara herself; "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.

↑ See Dwight's Journal of Music, Vol. VIII. No. 3.

ing at the Lyceum, and had been waiting nearly fifteen minutes!

II.

NEXT morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room, listening to that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And first he told me the story of Schumann's love.

The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter 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,

missive

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 purpose about the young composer, the secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one caught in the whorls of some happy dream, who will not pause to ask, "Whither?" he poured out before this child the halfrevealed hopes striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her ingenuous and earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in due time they were to be rather clenched, through pain. It was under this baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first sonata,-"Florestan and Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all from whom fame was graceful.

In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those wonderful little "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without it their meaning is as strange as their names. Often did he say, "I can write only where my life is in unison with my works." "Listen now to these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and struck the piano; "these are the voices of a new life."

ing these two: "Sternenkranz,” “Warum." Who has ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed the pathos of the latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath that crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts with the terrible questioning, Wherefore?

Thus before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each other, the shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was coming to pass. He had educated this girl to be an artist to bring him fame; alas, it must be confessed that he thought also of certain prospective thalers. Willing as he was that all Leipsic should admire his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the "Zeitschrift." He then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who, when he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally the poor soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst have known that it is Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!

The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all acquaintance, forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating at once Clara's career as a virtuoso, he took her to Vienna.

No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess of Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up to Beethoven. Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the "Schwärmbriefe of Eusebius to Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the general reader of the "Zeitschrift,"

who, doubtless, fancied that its editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.

"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out an angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou not with us? (Warum!) And how thou wilt have thought of us last night, from the 'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major symphony! I also thought of thee then, Chiara, pure one, bright one, whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither thy longing draws thee, but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."

At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's "Myrthen," whose dedication, Seiner geliebten Braut, breaks forth in the passionate and beautiful song,"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"

But this word Braut means Bride in the German sense of "affianced"; and although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the breath of a Tropic, bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his glorious First Symphony, which some one has well called the Symphony of Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an elusive vision, the two passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of bitter Marahs. "But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the right to know, from these,"-his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."

Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces when they ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.

III.

BUT another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to have revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I sought Boehner, and asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded to the one subject that bound us together, I requested

him to tell me, what had not yet been given to the world, the details of Schumann's insanity and death.

Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:· :

"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings so sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in extremes, was as if you gave an Eolian harp to be swept now by a cold north-wind and now by a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines of his flesh, and was not warmly covered thereby, but only veiled. Under his grief he seemed stronger; but when his joy came, when Clara was his own, and went through Europe with him, giving expression to the voices within, which, to him, had been unutterable, - then we saw that the emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps devastating torrent.

"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or six years before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times he imagined himself again cruelly separated from the patient and tender being who never left his side; and he would write pieces full of distractions, in the midst of each of which, however, some touchingly beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through seething seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a wearing persistence which none could restrain he would put our advice aside gently, saying, 'A long life is before me; but it must be lived in a few years.' And, indeed, the works which have reached farthest into hearts that loved him most deeply date from these times. I remember, that, when he sat down to compose his last symphony, he said,

It is almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion needs another chamber.". "Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word: Hasten.' I left all my affairs, and came to

watch for many months beside this beloved one. It was not a wild delirium which had taken possession of him; the only fit of that kind was that in which he tried to drown himself in the Rhine, - at the time when the papers got hold of the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his conviction that he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling power,-would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest discords. These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till night, during much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance. Of this music no chord or melody was true; they were jangling memories of his earlier works.

"One day he called his wife and my

self, and took our hands in his own:'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be understood here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.' Then, turning to me, he said, -Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my last prayer for you,' - handing me the paper which I have shown you; ' and now leave us, to come again and kiss me when I am cold.'

"Then I left him alone with his Clara. "A month from that time, Schumann was no more."

Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis Boehner, and said, as my voice would let me, "Take this paper, and when you would have a friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come and help me to be that friend."

Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is, Will the people of African descent work for a living? and the other is, Will they fight for their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must be put beyond any fair dispute before they will receive permanent security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the theses of philosophers or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of mankind is not likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have not industry sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present development of human nature, is the conscience of great communities likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to restrain them from disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to injure, because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be lavished upon them

in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to be an estate of the realm, and not before. Let us, then, take the world as we find it, and try this people accordingly. But it is not pertinent to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art, literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to glow upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes. No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with their forms. How many

or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the