How, in our wretched conditions, could enthusiasm, love, and art have their true effect?

“Patience and resignation” is our device, and to it we sing

[Here, Liszt illustrates with a music score excerpt]

Pardon me for being your hollow echo, and let us endure what cannot be cured.

I am very grateful to you for being so kind to Klindworth.  In a few days his cousin will come to London and bring you news of me, as she has spent the whole winter at Weymar.  Your letter about the sonata has highly delighted me, and you must excuse me for not having thanked you at once.  You are often so near to me that I almost forget writing to you, and I am seldom at the right temperature for correspondence.  Well, in September I shall be with you; and (D.V.) we will have some bright, comforting days together.

Your

F. L.

Weymar, May 2nd, 1855.

186.

Dear poet, dear friend,

Our hearts are with you, and suffer with you; that you know, and cannot be ignorant of.

Let us hear from you soon, and forgive me if, in the midst of the preoccupations of your heart and of your grief, I ask you for a trifle; but it will cost you so little to grant it me, and you will give such great, such very great, pleasure by it.  It is the fate of poets and women sometimes to give what they have not themselves—­I mean happiness.  Take a piece of paper and write on it the following verses, which, as you know, appear to me written with the purest blood of my veins:-

“Nicht Gut, nicht Gold, noch gottliche Pracht; nicht Haus, nicht Hof, nicht herrischer Prunk, nicht truber Vertrage trugender Bund, noch heuchelnder Sitte hartes Gesetz:  selig in Lust und Leid lasst—­die Liebe nur sein!—­” Sign this with your name, your great name, enclose it in an envelope, address it to me, and put it in the post.  Forgive me for asking you this small thing—­small in its material aspect, but great as the world in its significance.

I press your two hands with mine, dear, dear, great man.

Carolyne.

May 7th, 1855.

187.

Cordial thanks, dearest Franz, for your kind note, which I had been expecting a long time.  The hope which you open to me of seeing you in September is my only light in the night of this sad year.  I live here like one of the lost souls in hell.  I never thought that I could sink again so low.  The misery I feel in having to live in these disgusting surroundings is beyond description, and I now realise that it was a sin, a crime, to accept this invitation to London, which in the luckiest case must have led me far away from my real path.  I need not expatiate to you upon my actual situation.  It is the consistent outgrowth of the greatest inconsistency I ever committed.  I am compelled to conduct an English concert programme right down to the end; that says everything.