Before starting on the trip to Italy just mentioned, he felt that a decision must be reached about his music.  It had become as the breath of life to him.  He wrote his mother and laid bare his heart to her.  “My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or let us say—­between music and law.  If I follow my own bent, it points, as I believe correctly, to music.  Write yourself to Wieck at Leipsic and ask him frankly what he thinks of me and my plan.  Beg him to answer at once and decisively.”  The letter was duly written to Wieck, who decided in favor of Robert and his plans.

Robert on hearing his decision was wild with joy.  He wrote an exuberant letter to Wieck promising to be most submissive as a piano pupil and saying “whole pailfuls of very very cold theory can do me no harm and I will work at it without a murmur.  I give myself up wholly to you.”

With a heart full of hope, young Schumann returned to Leipsic, which he had gladly left more than a year before.  It was during this early resumption of piano lessons with Wieck that he began the treatment which he thought would advance his technic in such a marvelously short time.  He fastened his third finger into a machine, of his own invention, then practised unceasingly with the other four.  At last he lost control over the muscles of the right hand, to his great distress.  He now practised unremittingly with the left hand, which gained great facility, remarkable long after he had given up piano playing.

Under these difficulties piano lessons with Wieck had to be given up and were never resumed.  He studied theory for a short time with Kupach, but soon relinquished this also.  He was now free to direct his own path in music and to study—­study, and compose.

One of the first pieces he wrote was “The Papillons”—­“Butterflies,”—­published as Op. 2.  It was dedicated to his three sisters-in-law, of all of whom he was very fond.  In the various scenes of the Butterflies there are allusions to persons and places known to the composer; the whimsical spirit of Jean Paul broods over the whole.

Robert began to realize more and more his lack of thorough theoretical knowledge and applied to Dorn, who stood high in the musical profession in Leipsic.  On his introduction, in spite of his lame hand he played his “Abegg Variations,” published as Op. 1, and Dorn was willing to accept the timid quiet youth as pupil.  He studied with great ardor, going from the A.B.C. to the most involved counterpoint.

Thus passed two or three busy years.  Part of the time Schumann had a room in the house of his teacher Wieck and thus was thrown more or less in the society of Clara Wieck, now a young girl of thirteen or fourteen.  Later he gave up his room—­though not his intimate relations with the family—­and moved to a summer residence in Riedel’s Garden, where he spent the days in music and the evenings with his friends.