In the productive year 1838, before the Scenes of Childhood, Schumann had written three books of “Novellettes,” which were now published for the first time and dedicated to Henselt. Springing from his happiest period the music flows as if of its own accord, and its framework is admirable. They are the most subtle pieces conceivable for the piano, and the most popular of his compositions, neat and regular music. Their construction is transparent; the sections arranged for contrasted effects. In the first piece we have the March, the Cantabile, and the Canon; in the second the glitter of semiquavers and the delicate rocking Intermezzo; in the third the humorous Staccato and the wild B minor section; in the fourth the dance and the song mingle with the staccatos of the sequences; in the fifth a Polonaise, in a style approached by few, and Intermezzi in legato, cantabile, and staccato; in the sixth and seventh the effective contrasts of scherzo, canon, and cantabile; in the eighth an air in duet alternates with several trios; all kinds of sections are attached, a voice from afar, and free repetitions, as if everything left over had been thrown into it. They are unsurpassed, wonderfully dainty pieces; but the Kreisleriana were an experience. The charming smoothness of the Novellettes was no longer alien to Schumann’s feelings. The older he grew the more he strove to attain a “dry light,” which might easily prove dangerous to his romantic temperament. He began to despise the exuberance of his youthful works. We cannot, in reading the last piano works of Schumann, restrain a certain feeling of pain. Where once the stream bubbled and sparkled, it now flowed too evenly; where before the music was _felt_, it is now constructed. A new ideal comes slowly into the circle of Schumann’s sympathies, and that was Mendelssohn. He not only admired Mendelssohn’s greatness, placing him perhaps even above Chopin, but, as his works show, he envied his constraining plastic art, which possibly he mistook for monumental calm.