Throughout the symphonic unity of the song is preserved. The third song, ‘I cannot grasp it,’ returns to the spirit of the first. It is an agitated allegretto movement. The voice part follows the words with utmost faithfulness; it is almost a free recitative, interrupted only by one gentle lyric phrase on the words, ‘I am thine forever.’ Yet here, again, there is a true melody throughout, and a charming one, but it seems only to peep out from behind the detached notes. The fourth song, ‘Thou, Ring upon My Finger,’ has much the design and movement of the second, though quieter. In the fifth, too, melody is dominant. In the sixth the composer returns to the declamatory style. Here the delineative music lies chiefly in the accompaniment, with lovely modulations and snatches of melody suggesting the timid wonder of the wife in her happiness. The voice part hardly comes to an end at all, but fades away on the words ‘Thy picture,’ while the piano takes up the tale. The next song, the lullaby, musically the least important of the eight, is a simple strophic melody with a broken chord accompaniment. The last is recitative pure and simple. The rests between phrases seem broken with sobs, out of which there rises the heroism of a determination to face life alone and without complaint. The emotional power of those few notes of recitative is beyond description. The stark tragedy of the opening lines becomes clouded over, as it were, with tears, and the music melts into calm grayness as the woman sings, ‘The veil falls; I withdraw into myself, where I have thee and my lost happiness.’ And then, as the great quiet of loneliness settles down, the piano sings softly the whole of the first song, the early glow of delicate color when the girl first beheld her hero. And we seem to see ahead the years of loneliness softened only by sweet memory. No group of songs has ever more perfectly achieved the union of words and music. The faults of this cycle on the artistic side are the faults of the generation. People’s views of life have changed much since Chamisso set maiden hearts a-fluttering. The notion of the wife as the bounden slave of her husband--a notion only a step or two removed from the theory of the harem--has given place to the healthier view of the wife as one of two high contracting parties. One cannot help noticing in Chamisso’s poems how small a part the child plays in the woman’s life. And the idea that upon the death of the husband the woman’s thoughts should be solely of her own past rather than of her child’s future is little short of repulsive. These are the faults of an individualistic, a pessimistic, an over-sentimental age. They are reflected in the spirit of the music. Since then our art, if it has become more sensuous, has also become more vigorous. Schumann’s work was for an age rather than for all time.