In the first song, _Seit ich ihn gesehen_, the young girl has just seen her hero; in a moment, almost, she has cast her young girlhood behind her; she feels strange presentiments; she no longer cares for the games of her sisters; she wishes to be alone; the personality of her hero seems to be ever present. In the second song she has come to know him. She makes no secret of her love; she sings it openly; she is proud of it before the world. In the next song she has heard his proposal. ‘_Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben_’ (‘I cannot grasp it, I cannot believe it’), she says, torn between joy and terror. But in the next song, _Du Ring an meinem Finger_, she is apostrophizing her engagement ring and looking at the long vista of life ahead. Number 5, _Helft mir, ihr Schwestern_, is sung on the bridal day. Next, she is in her own home, in the arms of her husband, vainly attempting to make him understand why she weeps when she is happiest. In number 7 she is singing a lively but tender lullaby to her newborn child. In the last song she is singing her grief at the death of her husband. ‘This is your first cruel act toward me,’ she says to the dead body. She sees before her a life of voluntary loneliness, assuaged by memories of her former happiness. The music with which Schumann interprets these songs may justly be called psychological. The term ‘psychological’ is applied freely and indiscriminately to music and usually without justice. Properly, music is far too abstract an art to carry any precise meanings. Yet with the gradual and persistent process of six centuries, whereby certain musical styles and progressions have come to be associated with definite moods, there has grown up a technique which, with a properly sympathetic audience, may be manipulated to express states of soul. Whatever this technique is worth, Schumann, in his _Frauenliebe und Leben_, has used it with masterly power. In the first song he writes a simple, timid melody, the rhythmic flow interrupted as though by the hesitation of a fluttering heart. ‘Since my eyes first beheld him I seem to have been blind.’ The emotion rises. ‘I care no more for the games of my sisters. I had rather weep.’ Then comes a lovely phrase of tender sweetness. Weeping for love is a precious delight. The broken melody continues. Not until the last bar does the hearer become conscious of its full charm and formal beauty. The second song, ‘He, the Noblest of All,’ is in a very different mood--proud and exuberant expression. It has a grand lyric sweep which only a fine artistic taste can restrain from a somewhat cheap pompousness. The middle section returns for a moment to the girl’s feelings of timidity. ‘Turn from me before it is too late,’ she says; ‘I am not worthy of you.’ Schumann has chosen not to interrupt the flow of his song here. To express the more timid mood he employs dissonance and chromatic progression, which finally resolves into the original clear-cut strain.