The later songs of Schumann can be summed up in a few lines. There were a few written in the 1840 period, apparently cast aside as unworthy and inadvisedly published later when Schumann’s matchless faculty of self-criticism had become weak and dim. Opus 51 contains a delightful folk-like song, ‘When I into the Garden Go.’ Opus 53 contains the fine ballad, _Blondel’s Lied_, already described. Opus 79 is a book of songs for children, containing two or three, notably _Käuzlein_, _Sandmann_, and _Marienwürmchen_, which bring back a breath of the youthful romantic Schumann. But nothing could be more pitiful than the settings which Schumann about this time gave to some of Goethe’s finest poems--especially the _Wilhelm Meister_ and the ‘Western Divan’ songs. The settings of Queen Mary Stuart’s poems, published in 1852, are perhaps better than the other pieces of the period, especially the prayer, which has an appealing melody and much harmonic freedom in the accompaniment. But the ballads of this later period--including Schiller’s ‘The Glove,’ Hebbel’s ‘Fair Hedwig,’ and others--are mere collections of musical bombast. Let us draw the veil. For soon Schumann was to throw himself into the Rhine in attempted suicide, a martyr to the vigorous activity of fifteen years--years, one of which produced the remarkable songs which we have just been studying, by which alone his name need be known in song literature. IV Among Schumann’s contemporaries in song literature we may mention his wife Clara, his friend and rival Mendelssohn, together with several lesser known composers--Reinecke, Volkmann, and Jadassohn--and, finally, two important men, Chopin and Glinka. Clara Schumann (born 1819, Clara Josephine Wieck, died 1896) was a talented composer and a virtuoso pianist who worked throughout her married life in closest sympathy with her husband. Three of her songs appear in Schumann’s opus 37--namely, numbers 2, 4, and 11, _Er ist gekommen_, _Liebst du um Schönheit_, and _Warum willst du and’re fragen?_ These songs must be ranked high, for their scholarly command of style and their general finish, though they are obviously not works of special inspiration. The best of the three is probably the second, in which the composer makes extensive use of one of her husband’s devices, that of repeating a single phrase in various forms and building up the song as out of a single shape of stone. The last named of the three songs also has a good melody to its credit.