“Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never
     want for such a friend as thou hast been to

     ROBERT SCHUMANN.”

I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when, at this moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a living halo.

Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before them the fulness of this incident.  But to others I may briefly mention some facts connected with Schumann’s “Carnival, or Scenes Mignonnes, on Four Notes.”  Not by any means representing the pure depths of Schumann’s soul, this strange medley is yet pregnant with historic associations.  The composer wrote it in his young days, stringing twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a town of Saxony, “whither,” according to Sobolewski, “Schumann’s thoughts frequently strayed, because at that time there was an object there interesting to his sensitive soul.”  In the letters A, S, C, H, it must be remembered that the H in German stands for our B natural, and S or es for E flat.  The Leipsic “Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik” was begun and for ten years edited by Schumann,—­in what spirit we may gather from his own words:—­“The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very encouraging.  On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and Huenten excluded all others.  And yet how few years had passed since Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us!  True, Mendelssohn’s star was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole, Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence.  One day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,—­Let us not idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art shall be again enthroned!” Then gathered together a Protestant-league of music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann.  The Devil at which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the Philistines, which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc., for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.  “Young Germany” was making itself felt in all cooerdinate directions:  forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,—­a sharp and spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality brought together in Kuehne’s cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, “who talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz Schubert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo.”  This was the Davidsbund, or League of David (the last of the “Scenes Mignonnes” is named “Marche des Davidsbuendler contre les Philistines").  An agreeable writer in the “Weimarer Somitagsblatt” has given us a fine sketch of this company, which we will quote.