To understand better what is meant by the word ‘psychological’ in connection with Schumann’s songs, let us turn to his most famous group, the ‘Woman’s Life and Love.’ The first of the group, ‘Since My Eyes Beheld Him,’ tells of the young girl who has awakened to her first half-consciousness of love. It is hero worship, but it is disconcerting, making her strangely conscious of herself, anxious to be alone and dream, surrounded by a half sensuous, half sentimental mist. The music is hesitating and broken, with many chromatic progressions and suspensions in the piano part which rob it of any firm harmonic outline. In the whole of the voice part there is not a single perfect cadence. The melody is utterly lovely, but it sounds indefinite, as though it were always just beginning; only here and there it rises into a definite phrase of moody longing. In the second song, the famous _Er, der Herrlichste von Allen_ the girl has come to full consciousness of her emotion. Her loved one is simply her hero, the noblest of men. The music is straightforward and decisive; the main theme begins with the notes of the tonic chord (the ‘bugle notes’). There is no lack of full cadence and pure half cadences. In the third song the girl has received the man’s avowal of love, and is overcome with amazement, almost terror, that her hero should look with favor upon _her_. The voice part is scarcely more than a broken recitative, and the accompaniment is largely of short sharp chords. Only for one ecstatic instant the melody becomes lyrically lovely, in the richest German strain: it is on the words ‘I am forever thine.’ In the sixth song the mother is gazing at her newborn baby and weeping. The voice part is free declamation, with a few rich chords in the accompaniment to mark the underlying depth of emotion. In the eighth and last song the husband has died. The form of the song is much the same as that of the sixth, only the chords are now heavy and tragic. As the lamenting voice dies away the piano part glides into the opening song, played softly; the wife dreams of the first awakening of her love. The effect is to cast the eight songs into a long backward vista, magically making us feel that we have lived through the years of the woman’s life and love. This, easily the most famous of song cycles, is the type of all of them. Beethoven wrote a true cycle, but his songs are by no means equal to Schumann’s. Schubert wrote cycles, but none with the close bond and inner unity of this one. Nor are Schumann’s other cycles--‘Myrtles,’ the _Liederkreis_, song series from Eichendorff and another under the same name from other poets, the ‘Poet’s Love’ from Heine, the Kerner cycle, and the ‘Springtime of Love’ cycle--so closely bound as this. The song cycle, on this plane, is a triumph of the accurate delineative power of music.