correspondence is that, when quite a young man, Schumann commenced a
treatise on musical æsthetics. In view of the many epoch-making
thoughts contained in his two volumes of collected criticisms, it is
very much to be regretted that this plan was not carried out. On one
question of musical psychology light is thrown by several of these
letters. Like many other composers, it seems that Schumann often, if
not generally, had some pictorial image or event in his mind in
composing. "When I composed my first songs," he writes to Clara, "I
was entirely within you. Without such a bride one cannot write such
music." "I am affected by everything that goes on in the
world--politics, literature, mankind. In my own manner I meditate on
everything, which then seeks utterance in music. That is why many of
my compositions are so difficult to understand, because they relate to
remote affairs; and often significant, because all that's remarkable
in our time affects me, and I have to give it expression in musical
language." One of the letters to Clara begins: "Tell me what the first
part of the Fantasia suggests to you. Does it not bring many pictures
before your mind?" Concerning the "Phantasiestücke" he writes: "When
they were finished I was delighted to find the story of Hero and
Leander in them.... Tell me if you, too, find this picture fitting the
music." "The Papillons," he says once more, are intended to be a
musical translation of the final scene in Jean Paul's "Flegeljahre."

Believers in telepathy will be interested in the following additional
instance of composing with a visual object in mind: "I wrote to you
concerning a presentiment; it occurred to me on the days from March
24th to 27th, when I was at work on my new composition. There is a
place in it to which I constantly recurred; it is as if some one
sighed, 'Ach, Gott!' from the bottom of his heart. While composing, I
constantly saw funeral processions, coffins, unhappy people in