Frau Schumann wished Robert to study law, and sent him to the University at Leipzig for that purpose and later to Heidelberg.  He was not the least interested in his legal studies, but loved to play the piano, and write letters, and dream of literature, to idolise Jean Paul Richter and to indulge a most commendable passion for good cigars.  He was not dilatory at love, and went through a varied apprenticeship before his heart seemed ready for the fierce test it was put to in his grand passion.

In 1827, he being then seventeen years old, we find him writing to a schoolfellow a letter of magnificent melancholy; the tone of its allusions to a certain young woman reminds one of Chopin’s early love letters.  How sophomoric and seventeen-year-oldish they sound!

“Oh, friend! were I but a smile, how would I flit about her eyes! ... were I but joy, how gently would I throb in all her pulses! yea, might I be but a tear, I would weep with her, and then, if she smiled again, how gladly would I die on her eyelash, and gladly, gladly, be no more.”

“My past life lies before me like a vast, vast evening landscape, over which faintly quivers a rosy kiss from the setting sun.”

He bewails two dissipated ideals.  One, named “Liddy,” “a narrow-minded soul, a simple maiden from innocent Eutopia; she cannot grasp an idea.”  And yet she was very beautiful, and if she were “petrified,” every critic would pronounce her perfection.  The boy sighs with that well-known senility of seventeen: 

“I think I loved her, but I knew only the outward form in which the roseate tinted fancy of youth often embodies its inmost longings.  So I have no longer a sweetheart, but am creating for myself other ideals, and have in this respect also broken with the world.”

Again he looks back upon his absorbing passion for a glorious girl called “Nanni,” but that blaze is now “only a quietly burning sacred flame of pure divine friendship and reverence.”

A month after this serene resignation he goes to Dresden, and finds his heart full of longing for this very “Nanni.”  He roves the streets looking under every veil that flutters by him in the street, in the hope that he might see her features; he remembers again “all the hours which I dreamed away so joyfully, so blissfully in her arms and her love.”  He did not see her, but later, to his amazement, he stumbles upon the supposedly finished sweetheart “Liddy.”  She is bristling with “explanations upon explanations.”  She begs him to go up a steep mountain alone with her.  He goes “from politeness, perhaps also for the sake of adventure.”  But they are both dumb and tremulous and they reach the peak just at sunset.  Schumann describes that sunset more gaudily than ever chromo was painted.  But at any rate it moved him to seize Liddy’s hand and exclaim, somewhat mal-a-propos:  “Liddy, such is our life.”

He plucked a rose and was about to give it to her when a flash of lightning and a cloud of thunder woke him from his dreams; he tore the rose to pieces, and they returned home in silence.