Schumann's widow, in editing these letters, would have received a pang
from many other passages revealing Schumann's fondness for the fair
sex. He allowed no good-looking woman to pass him on the street
without taking the opportunity to cultivate his sense of beauty. After
his engagement to Clara he gives her fair warning that he has the
"very mischievous habit" of being a great admirer of beautiful women
and girls. "They make me positively smirk, and I swim in panegyrics on
your sex. Consequently, if at some future time we walk along the
streets of Vienna and meet a beauty, and I exclaim, 'Oh, Clara! see
this heavenly vision,' or something of the sort, you must not be
alarmed nor scold me." He had a number of transient passions before he
discovered that Clara was his only true love. There was Nanni, his
"guardian angel," who saved him from the perils of the world and
hovered before his vision like a saint. "I feel like kneeling before
her and adoring her like a Madonna." But Nanni had a dangerous rival
in Liddy. Not long, however, for he found Liddy silly, cold as marble,
and--fatal defect--she could not sympathize with him regarding Jean
Paul. "The exalted image of my ideal disappears when I think of the
remarks she made about Jean Paul. Let the dead rest in peace."

Several of his flames are not alluded to in this correspondence. On
his travels he appears to have had the habit of noting down in his
diary the prevalence and peculiarities of feminine beauty. He
complains that from Mainz to Heidelberg he "did not see a single
pretty face." Yet, as a whole, the Rhine maidens seem to have won his
admiration:

"What characteristic faces among the lowest classes! On the west shore
of the Rhine the girls have very delicate features, indicating
amiability rather than intelligence; the noses are mostly Greek, the