Schumann had attended the Zwickau Gymnasium in due course; and at eighteen, in 1828, he entered the legal profession at Leipzig. His piano-lessons under Frederick Wieck of course attracted him far more than jurisprudence; and when, after an interval spent at Heidelberg, he returned to Leipzig, the die was cast. The letter to his mother in which he announces his decision is to-day interesting for the light it throws on his intentions. Naturally, he thought of the career of a virtuoso; and, in order to make his fingers supple, he hung one of them in a sling while practising, with the result that first the finger and then the whole hand was maimed, and Schumann was saved for pure composition. Composition is soon intimately knit with love for Clara Wieck, the daughter of his teacher, whose great talent was to compensate him for his own lost power. We cannot forget his youthful letters to Clara, which form the conclusion of the edition of “Schumann’s Letters,” which she issued. Never were more lyrical letters written. He dedicates to Clara his whole power of creation; it is she that lives in all his pieces, and to create was to think of her. Before this he tells her legends and supernatural tales. “Look now at your old Robert; is he not still the frivolous ghost-tale teller and terrifier? But now I can be very serious too, often the whole day long--but don’t trouble about that--they are generally processes in my soul, thoughts on music and compositions. Everything touches me that goes on in the world--politics, literature, people. I think after my own fashion of everything that can express itself through music, or can escape by means of it. This is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand, because they are bound up with very remote associations, and often very much so because everything of importance in the time takes hold of me and I must express it in musical form. And this, too, is why so few compositions satisfy my mind, because, apart from all defect in craftsmanship, the ideas themselves are often on a low plane, and their expression is often commonplace. The highest that is here attained scarcely reaches to the beginning of what is aimed at in my music. The former may be a flower, the latter is the poem, so much the more spiritual; the one is an impulse of raw nature; the other the work of poetical consciousness.”