In 1828, at Augsburg, he cast his affectionate eyes upon Clara von Kurer, the daughter of a chemist; but found her already engaged.  It was now that he entered the University at Leipzig to study law.  The wife of Professor Carus charmed him by her singing and inspired various songs.  At her house he met the noted piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thus began an acquaintance of strange vicissitude and strange power for torment and delight.

Wieck, who was then forty-three, chiefly lived in the career of his wonder-child, a pianist, Clara Josephine Wieck.  She had been born at Leipzig on September 13, 1819, and was only nine years old, and nine years younger than Schumann, when they met.  She made a sensational debut in concert the same year.  And, child as she was, she excited at once the keenest and most affectionate admiration in Schumann.  He did not guess then how deeply she was doomed to affect him, but while she was growing up his heart seemed merely to loaf about till she was ready for it.

For a time he became Wieck’s pupil, hoping secretly to be a pianist, not a lawyer.  He dreamed already of storming America with his virtuosity.

In 1829, while travelling, he wrote his mother, “I found it frightfully hard to leave Leipzig at the last.  A girl’s soul, beautiful, happy, and pure, had enslaved mine.”  But this soul was not Clara’s.  A few months later, he made a tour through Italy, and wrote of meeting “a beautiful English girl, who seemed to have fallen in love, not so much with myself as my piano playing, for all English women love with the head—­I mean they love Brutuses, or Lord Byrons, or Mozart and Raphaels.”  Surely one of the most remarkable statements ever made, and appropriately demolished by the very instances brought to substantiate it, for, to the best of my knowledge, Mozart, Brutus, and Raphael had affairs with other than English women; and so did, for the matter of that, Lord Byron.

A week later Schumann wrote from Venice, whither he had apparently followed the English beauty: 

“Alas, my heart is heavy ... she gave me a spray of cypress when we parted....  She was an English girl, very proud, and kind, and loving, and hating ... hard but so soft when I was playing—­accursed reminiscences!”

The wound was not mortal.  A little later, and he was showing almost as much enthusiasm in his reference to his cigars.  “Oh, those cigars!” We find him smoking one at five A.M., on July 30th, at Heidelberg.  He had risen early to write, “the most important letter I have ever written,” pleading ardently with his mother to let him be a musician.  She decided to leave the decision concerning her son’s future to Wieck, who, knowing Schumann’s attainments and promise, voted for music.  Schumann, wild with delight and ambition, fled from Heidelberg and the law.  He went to Mainz on a steamer with many English men and women, and he writes his mother, “If ever I marry, it will be an English girl.”  He did not know what was awaiting him in the home of Wieck, whose house he entered as pupil and lodger, almost as a son.