direction.  This melancholy dialogue, which was repeated at longer intervals, affected me so much that I could not fix the very simple musical component parts in my memory.  However, on a subsequent occasion I was told that this folk-song was of great poetic interest.  As I was returning home late one night on the gloomy canal, the moon appeared suddenly and illuminated the marvellous palaces and the tall figure of my gondolier towering above the stern of the gondola, slowly moving his huge sweep.  Suddenly he uttered a deep wail, not unlike the cry of an animal; the cry gradually gained in strength, and formed itself, after a long-drawn ‘Oh!’ into the simple musical exclamation ‘Venezia!’ This was followed by other sounds of which I have no distinct recollection, as I was so much moved at the time.  Such were the impressions that to me appeared the most characteristic of Venice during my stay there, and they remained with me until the completion of the second act of Tristan, and possibly even suggested to me the long-drawn wail of the shepherd’s horn at the beginning of the third act.

These sensations, however, did not manifest themselves very easily or consecutively.  Bodily sufferings and my usual cares, that never quite left me, often considerably hindered and disturbed my work.  I had scarcely settled down comfortably in my rooms, the northerly aspect of which exposed them to frequent gusts of wind (from which I had practically no protection in the form of heating appliances), and had barely got over the demoralising effect of dysentery, when I fell a victim to a specific Venetian complaint, namely a carbuncle on my leg, as the result of the extreme change of climate and of air.  This happened just when I was intending to resume the second act, that had been so cruelly interrupted.  The malady, which I had first regarded as slight, soon increased and became exceedingly painful, and I was obliged to call in a doctor, who had to treat me carefully for nearly four weeks.  It was in the late autumn, towards the end of November, that Ritter left me to pay a visit to his relations and friends in Dresden and Berlin; I therefore remained quite alone during this long illness, with no other society than that of the servants of the house.  Incapable of work, I amused myself by reading the History of Venice by Count Daru, in which I became much interested, as I was on the spot.  Through it I lost some of my popular prejudices against the tyrannical mode of government in ancient Venice.  The ill-famed Council of Ten and the State Inquisition appeared to me in a peculiar, although certainly horrible, light; the open admission that in the secrecy of its methods lay the guarantee of the power of the state, seemed to me so decidedly in the interests of each and every member of the marvellous republic, that the suppression of all knowledge was very wisely considered a republican duty.  Actual hypocrisy was entirely foreign to this state constitution; moreover the clerical element,