“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 waiting 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,
  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.”