I want to consecrate my pen for the new year, and cannot do so better than by a greeting to you, my dear Franz.  Above all other wishes is my wish of seeing you and enjoying you to my heart’s content.  The worst loss of the past year has been that of the visit you had promised me.  If I were to try to imagine the greatest delight that could be vouchsafed to me, it would be to see you suddenly in my room.  Are you inclined at all for such a stroke of genius?  If I were only free you would experience such a surprise from me, but I must no longer hope for miracles; everything comes to me in a laborious and gradual way, and, after all, I have to share it with a host of Zurich professors.  You perceive I am not very many-sided.  My ideas move in a somewhat narrow circle, which, fortunately, through the objects it comprises, becomes as large as the world to me (I do not count the Zurich professors amongst those objects).  If I have a grudge against your eternal and manifold obligations and engagements, you will understand my very special reason, viz., that they take you away from me so much.  Candidly speaking, my being together with you is everything to me; it is my fountain, all the rest is but overflow.  When I sit down to write to you I do not know what to say.  Nothing occurs to me but what I cannot write.  To speak to you of “business” is altogether an abomination to me, for when I deal with you my heart grows large, while business narrows it in the most deplorable manner.  It is bad enough when, as formerly was too often the case, I am compelled to trouble you with my private sorrows.  Especially today these must be far from me, for the first stroke of my pen in the new year is to convey nothing but a pure, sonorous greeting to you.  I want to tell you, however, that yesterday, at last, I finished the first act of “Tristan.”  I shall work at “Tristan” assiduously; at the beginning of the next winter season I want to produce it somewhere.

My reading is, at present, confined to Calderon, who will at last induce me to learn a little Spanish.  Heaven forbid that in that case I should remind you of H. Nageli.  The necessary cache-nez I possess.  My wife has given me one, together with a splendid carpet with swans on it, a la Lohengrin.  I heard recently of your Dresden life with Gutzkow, Auerbach, etc., etc.  Oh, you tremendous fellow!  You can do anything.  Perhaps you, too, will appear to me in a Spanish light, when I shall have a good laugh at you.  I have struck up a friendship with the X.’s for the sole purpose of not being again left out of their invitation when the time comes.  But I begin already to regret having done so, and any amount of enthusiasm cannot make me appreciate this abominable race of professors.  But you will see by my having made the attempt that I wish to get rid of my roughness, in order to be quite amiable at your next visit.  Did I recently write something stupid to the dear Child?  I cannot remember exactly,