between Schumann’s intellectual life and the outer world, he composed many of his finest vocal and instrumental compositions during the years immediately succeeding his marriage; among them the cantata “Paradise and the Peri,” and the “Faust” music.  His own connection with public life was restricted to his position as teacher of piano-forte playing, composition, and score playing at the Leipzig Conservatory, while the gifted wife was the interpreter of his beautiful piano-forte works as an executant.  A more perfect fitness and companionship in union could not have existed, and one is reminded of the married life of the poet pair, the Brownings.  After four years of happy and quiet life, in which mental activity was inspired by the most delightful of domestic surroundings, an artistic tour to St. Petersburg was undertaken by Robert and Clara Schumann.  Our composer did not go without reluctance.  “Forgive me,” he writes to a friend, “if I forbear telling you of my unwillingness to leave my quiet home.”  He seems to have had a melancholy premonition that his days of untroubled happiness were over.  A genial reception awaited them at the Russian capital.  They were frequently invited to the Winter Palace by the emperor and empress, and the artistic circles of the city were very enthusiastic over Mme. Schumann’s piano-forte playing.  Since the days of John Field, Clementi’s great pupil, no one had raised such a furore among the music-loving Russians.  Schumann’s music, which it was his wife’s dearest privilege to interpret, found a much warmer welcome than among his own countrymen at that date.  In the Sclavonic nature there is a deep current of romance and mysticism, which met with instinctive sympathy the dreamy and fantastic thoughts which ran riot in Schumann’s works.

On returning from the St. Petersburg tour, Schumann gave up the “Neue Zeitschrift,” the journal which he had made such a powerful organ of musical revolution, and transferred it to Oswald Lorenz.  Schumann’s literary work is so deeply intertwined with his artistic life and mission that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the two.  He had achieved a great work—­he had planted in the German mind the thought that there was such a thing as progress and growth; that stagnation was death; and that genius was for ever shaping for itself new forms and developments.  He had taught that no art is an end to itself, and that, unless it embodies the deep-seated longings and aspirations of men ever striving toward a loftier ideal, it becomes barren and fruitless—­the mere survival of a truth whose need had ceased.  He was the apostle of the musico-poetical art in Germany, and, both as author and composer, strove with might and main to educate his countrymen up to a clear understanding of the ultimate outcome of the work begun by Beethoven, Schubert, and Weber.