The year 1818 witnessed the beginning of an episode in Schubert's life, quite different in many respects from what had preceded. He was engaged by Count Esterhazy to teach music in his family. There were two daughters, Marie, aged thirteen, and Caroline, aged eleven, and a son aged five. All were musically gifted, and their friend, Baron von Schönstein, was a very accomplished singer. The engagement took Schubert to the Count's country home in Hungary for the summer, while the winter season was passed in Vienna. Schubert's intercourse with this amiable and cultivated family was very pleasant, and in the course of it seems to have occurred the nearest approach to a love affair that can be detected in his life. Little Caroline Esterhazy was at the outset not at an age likely to evoke the tender passion. But as time elapsed and she came to be seventeen or eighteen years of age, it has been supposed that Schubert manifested symptoms of having fallen in love with her. The evidence is slight, as evidence is apt to be in such matters, in the absence of anything like an overt declaration. The nearest that Schubert seems ever to have come to such a declaration was once when Caroline in an innocent moment of girlish coquetry asked him why, when he was dedicating so many delightful works to other persons, he had never dedicated anything to her. Schubert is said to have replied, "Why should I? Is not everything that I have ever done dedicated to you already?" This anecdote does not go far as proof. Question and answer might alike have been merely pleasant jesting. Contemporary rumor, in the case of a man so shy and reserved on all matters of deep feeling as Schubert, cannot be expected to tell us much. The general impression about him was that he was almost insensible to the charms of fair women. If this impression is to be taken as true, an interesting question is suggested. How could a man who was never in love have written that immortal Serenade in which all that is sweetest and most sacred in the love of man for woman comes forth like a fresh breath from heaven? Never was voice of love so passionate and so pure. Nowhere has human art ever found more consummate and faultless expression than in this song of songs. It could no more have come from a soul insensible to the passion of love than figs can grow upon thistles. Probably therefore the general impression about Schubert was due in the main to his reticence. We have also to bear in mind that such a nature as his can find in artistic creation a vent for emotional excitement strong enough to craze the ordinary mind. We know how it was with Goethe, how the worst pains of life were healed for him by being thrown off in passionate poetry. This is quite intelligible. It is a special illustration of Shakespeare's injunction:-- "Give sorrow words; the grief that cannot speak Whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break."