He plans how they shall write music together when they are married, and says: 

“When you are standing by me as I sit at the piano, then we shall both cry like children—­I know I shall be quite overcome.  Then you must not watch me too closely when I am composing; that would drive me to desperation; and for my part, I promise you, too, only very seldom to listen at your door.  Well, we shall lead a life of poetry and blossoms, and we shall play and compose together like angels, and bring gladness to mankind.”

He would have “a pretty cottage not far from town—­you at my side—­to work—­to live with me blissful and calm” (selig und still).  And when she wishes to tour:  “We’ll pack our diamonds together and go live in Paris.”

He writes her, complaining that her father called him phlegmatic, and said that he had written nothing in the Zeitschrift for six weeks.  He insists that he is leading a very serious life: 

“I am a young man of twenty-eight with a very active mind, and an artist, to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and have been sitting still, saving my money without a thought of spending it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way as usual.  And do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I have done are quite lost upon your father?”

Sometimes the strain under which the two lovers lived caused a little rift within the lute.  Poor Clara, forced to defend Robert against her father’s contempt, and her father against Robert’s indignation, preserved her double and contradictory dignity with remarkable skill, with a fidelity to both that makes her in the last degree both admirable and lovable.  When she advised patience or postponement, the impatient Robert saw her father’s hand moving the pen, and complained; but in his next letter he was sure to return to his attitude of tenderness for her in her difficulties, and determination to yield everything to circumstances except the final possession of the woman of his heart.

Musicians seem to be naturally good writers of letters.  In the first place, those whose fingers grow tired of playing notes or writing them, seem to find recreation in the reeling off of letters.  They have acquired an instinctive sense of form, and an instinct for smoothing over its rough edges, and modulating from one mood into another.  Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a good letter has so necessarily a unity of mood, that musicians, ex officio, tend to write correspondence that is literary without trying to be so, sincere without stupidity.  But in the volumes and volumes of musicians’ letters, which it has been my fortune to read, I have never found any others which were so ardent and yet so earnest, so throbbing with longing and yet so full of honesty, so eloquent and so dramatic with the very highest forms of eloquence and romance as those of Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck.