In these words Schumann penetrated into his own heart; and there is nothing to be added to this characterisation of his literary music. The new type existed in its purity; namely, the musician, standing on the height of the representative art of the time, of which type Wagner was the best expression. There is a strange likeness in these two opposed natures. What in Wagner passed over into the external, in Schumann passed into the intimate. Where the one carries us along with him in an intoxicating rush, the latter is a personal enjoyment for retiring souls. The one lives in the orchestra, and plays the piano badly; the other dreamed first for the piano, then for the chorus, and never was able to express himself tolerably through the orchestra. Wagner never burst into tears, like Schumann, when he before his wanderings played for the last time on the beloved instrument which had heard all the sorrows and joys of his youth. And Wagner never wrote to Madame Cosima as Schumann wrote to Clara: “You speak in your last of a cosy place where you would like to have me--do not aim too high--I ask no better surroundings than a piano and you close by. You will never be a kapellmeisterin in your life; but inwardly we are a match for any pair of kapellmeisters, are we not? You understand me.” This man of delicate feeling, who wished to reduce piano-culture to a system, was editor of a paper, which he founded at Leipzig in the year 1834, along with certain friends and men of like tastes, of whom he seems to have valued most Schunke, who died very soon. This “New Magazine of Music” was Schumann’s special medium, and in it he published his splendid and very spirited criticisms and aphorisms; later, when Brendel purchased it from him, it was of equal use to Wagner, his exact opposite. Till 1844 Schumann edited it for the most part personally; and his position aided the spread of his works, which laid themselves out so little for popular success. Still more effective was the career of his betrothed, who because of certain awkward obstacles only became his wife in 1840. This was his most productive year. It saw the appearance of a hundred and thirty-eight songs, and of the cycle of Heine’s lyrics (Op. 24). If the betrothed Clara and the piano were spiritually united, the married Clara and the song were equally so. Thus the songs stand precisely midway between his youthful piano-writings and the orchestral and choral efforts of his later years. And indeed the piano succeeds better in them than in any song hitherto written. The accompaniments of “Du, meine Seele” or of the F sharp major “Ueberm Garten durch die Lüfte,” are minute and scrupulous pieces of artistic work.