Pardon me for this confused stuff in reply to your beautiful, cheerful letter from the Rhine.  Perhaps I shall write in a better spirit soon.  I am on the point of landing at Brunnen, where you are still remembered as “double Peps.”  How cheerful you were at that time.

On board the “Stadt Zurich,” on the lake of Lucerne, en vue de Brunnen.

Remember July 31st.

163.

Dear, great man,

A thousand thanks for the autograph, which will give much joy.  This Fraulein Soest is a good, excellent girl, who was sent by her parents to England, and was there taken with home-sickness for the “Weymar school,” “the music of the future,” and the “Wagnerian opera.”  She managed to escape, and is now settled at Erfurt, where she gives pianoforte lessons, and from where she comes to Weymar to hear your poems.

Ten and a hundred thousand thanks for many other things besides.  Liszt was delighted to hear that his articles in the Weymar paper had pleased you.  It is a fine thing of you to have understood them so well.  They are to go on for some time, and the “Flying Dutchman” will conclude this series.  It is truly a wreath of mourning which he binds there; your dark, noble hero lives, and will live.  Sleep and solitude are not death; and his vital strength is such, that for a long time to come he will make the round of Europe at certain intervals.  Beethoven’s “Fidelio” is only just becoming acclimatised in London.

I am quite happy that the symphonic poems interest you.  When he is able to visit you, he will bring the scores with him.  At the present moment they are, I believe, being partly copied out and partly revised for engraving, etc., etc.  But you, dear, great genius, will be the first to read them.  They have been for the greater part performed here.  The music is most beautiful, very noble, very elevated.

Your letters give us the same joy which a poor man used only to kicks and coarse copper coin would feel at receiving an alms of gold.  Give us that alms frequently, because you are none the poorer for it.  Allow Liszt to manage Hulsen, and leave Berlin to him wholly and entirely.  It may go slowly, but it will go well and, before all, decently.  How good, how prudent, how delicate and patient, he is—­that I know.  Another man would during these six years have sunk and been drowned eighteen times in the storms which have our poor little barque for a plaything.  He alone keeps us still on the surface.

Liszt has written to Berlin to find some one who will copy your “Rhinegold,” the beautiful “Rhinegold,” for which our ears are sighing.  He whom he thought would answer your purpose is not free for the present.  What is needed to make you begin the “Valkyrie?” And oh! that wonderful scene between Wotan and Brynhild—­the divine Brynhild, who saves Sieglinde!  Write at great length; it will do good to our three hearts, which are united and inseparable.  The whole atmosphere of the Altenburg is gently illumed when a letter from you has arrived.