Out of a world like this floated all sorts of compositions into Schumann’s mind, as once from the “Flegeljahre” of Jean Paul. Thence came the “Scenes of Childhood,” where we listen to tales of foreign lands and men, and dream by the hearth, and play Blind-Man’s Buff, and then bend forward to hear, for the Poet is speaking. They are his miniature painting; of a gentle ineffable grace. Only a “Romantic” can love children thus. Schumann himself had a particular fondness for these little pieces, whose smallness was their very essence. [Illustration: Louis Böhner, the original of Hoffmann’s Kreisler. Engraved by Freytag.] From Hoffmann also came the inspiration of the “Kreisleriana,” so called after Hoffmann’s tale of the eccentric Kapellmeister Kreisler. In 1834 Ludwig Böhner, the original of Kreisler, met Schumann. Once “as famous as Beethoven,” he jeered at men till they now jeer at him. In his Improvisations, here and there, we catch a glimpse of the old brilliancy; but elsewhere it is all dark and waste. “Had I time,” says Schumann, “I should like to write _ana_ of Böhner to the papers. He himself has given me plenty of material. In his life there has been too much both of joy and of sorrow.” Here was a happy conjuncture for Schumann’s genius. A suggestive bit of life, and its poetic setting by Hoffmann, which had first appeared to him as literature, was transformed into music, and a work was born whose title, as so often, he borrowed from a fiction with whose contents it had but little connection, except as suggesting the groundwork. The “Kreisleriana” was his greatest work. The artist who brings life itself, gently transfigured by literary art, into musical emotion, never before or since became so clear a personality. The piano has advanced into the midst of a life-culture. A thousand threads run from all sides into this intimate web in which the whole lyrical devotion of a musical soul is interwoven. The piano is the orchestra of the heart. The joys and sorrows which are expressed in these pieces were never put into form with more sovereign power. For the external form Bach gave the impulse; for the content, Hoffmann. The garlanded roses of the middle section of No. 1, the shimmering blossoms of the “inverted” passage in the “Langsamer” of No. 2, the immeasurable depth of the emotions in the slow pieces (4 and 6), the bass unfettered by accent, in the final bars of No. 8, leading down to the final whisperings, are all among the happiest of inspirations. [Illustration: The last piece in Schumann’s “Kreisleriana,” main movement. After the autograph in the possession of Baroness Wilhelm von Rothschild, Frankfort a.M. Differs from the printed edition, being simpler and more massive.]