[Illustration:  Robert and Clara Schumann in 1847.  From a lithograph in possession of the Society of Friends of Music, Vienna.]

Schumann entered with enthusiasm upon the career of his choice.  He left Heidelberg and took lodgings with the Wiecks in Leipsic.  Clara, then a mere girl, though already winning fame as a concert pianist, certainly was too young for him to have fallen seriously in love with, or for her to have responded to any such feeling.  Even at that early age, however, she exercised a strange power of attraction over him.  His former literary tastes had given him a great fund of stories and anecdotes, and he delighted in the evenings to gather about him the children of the family, Clara among them, and entertain them with tales from the Arabian Nights and ghost and fairy stories.

Among his compositions at this time are a set of impromptus on a theme by Clara, and it is significant of his regard for her that later he worked them over, as if he did not consider them in their original shape good enough for her.  Then we have from this period a letter which he wrote to the twelve-year-old girl while she was concertizing in Frankfort, and in which the expressions certainly transcend those of a youth for a child, or of an elder brother for a sister, if one cared to picture their relations as such.  Indeed, he writes to her that he often thinks other “not as a brother does of a sister, nor as one friend of another, but as a pilgrim of a distant altar-picture.”  He asks her if she has composed much, adding, “In my dreams I sometimes hear music—­so you must be composing.”  He confides in her about his own work, tells her that his theoretical studies (with Heinrich Dorn) have progressed as far as the three-part fugue; and that he has a sonata in B minor and a set of “Papillons” ready; then jokingly asks her how the Frankfort apples taste and inquires after the health of the F above the staff in the “jumpy Chopin variation,” and informs her that his paper is giving out.  “Everything gives out, save the friendship in which I am Fraulein C. W.’s warmest admirer.”

For a letter from a man of twenty-one to a girl of twelve, the above is remarkable.  If Clara had not afterward become Robert’s wife, it would have interest merely as a curiosity.  As matters eventuated, it is a charming prelude to the love-symphony of two lives.  Moreover, there seems to have been ample ground for Schumann’s admiration.  Dorn has left a description of Clara as she was at this time, which shows her to have been unusually attractive.  He speaks of her as a fascinating girl of thirteen, “graceful in figure, of blooming complexion, with delicate white hands, a profusion of black hair, and wise, glowing eyes.  Everything about her was appetizing, and I never have blamed my pupil, young Robert Schumann, that only three years later he should have been completely carried away by this lovely creature, his former fellow-pupil and future wife.”  Her purity and her genius, added to her beauty, may well have combined to make Robert, musical dreamer and enthusiast on the threshold of his career, think of her, when absent, “as a pilgrim of a distant altar-picture.”