Coming upon

Is there a word, in English, for the pleasure one feels in coming across an idea or possibility that, although previously unfamiliar, immediately promises reward? A combination of discovery and anticipation; the feeling, perhaps, that accompanies a kiss, at the outset of a relationship, or that attends the first view of a city towards which one's plane is descending. This, one senses, could be wonderful.

Early in the 1820s, Franz Schubert issued an ominous invitation to his friend Joseph von Spaun. "Come over to [their friend] Schober's today," he said, "and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost my more effort than any of my other songs." When von Spaun arrived, what he heard was remarkable: the entire Winterreise cycle, sung by Schubert in an especially emotional voice. "We were utterly dumbfounded," von Spaun later remembered, "by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs."

My copy of Winterreise arrived yesterday, in the mail, and as soon as I put it in - with Cleo in one arm, and large, talon-like icicles outside the window - I knew what von Spaun had meant. How could you miss it? The songs open onto a bleak landscape of melancholy that is virtually without parallel, in my experience of music. "Look!" reads a section of Dreams of Spring. "Who has painted leaves on the windowpane, as if to mock the dreamer who sees flowers in winter?"

A question that resonates especially powerfully this week, as we scurry through walls of snow, slide across iced pools of temporarily melted, and then re-frozen, water, and study, with close attention, the deals on cruises that float into our inbox. Who has placed, we wonder, the book with the many flowers within Cleo's reach, as though it were April, rather than February? Are the plush lambs that surround her a real prospect, or merely a cold joke?

Cleo, of course, doesn't ask such questions. And she doesn't worry about the text of the lieder. For her, discovery lies not in a CD case so much as in major principles, which are currently the source of her fascination. When she throws things, they roll, and stop. When she drops them, from her high chair, they drop - and then Daddy picks them up (until he doesn't). And when she smiles, strangers smile at her.

The world outside may seem mournful, gloomy, desperate. The one inside, though, seems full of hope.