the unclipped trees, ’where one might light upon a caterpillar again,’ he said, and decided definitely to migrate to Zurich, and thus brought himself and his family permanently into my circle of acquaintance.  True, he had small prospect of commissions for large buildings, and considered himself doomed to play the schoolmaster for ever.  He was, however, in the throes of writing a great work on art, which, after various mishaps and a change of publisher, he brought out later under the title, Der Styl.  I often found him engaged with the drawings for illustrating this book; he drew them himself very neatly on stone, and grew so fond of the work that he declared the smallest detail in his drawing interested him far more than the big clumsy architectural jobs.

From this time forward, in accordance with my manifesto, I would have nothing whatever to do with the ‘Musikgesellschaft,’ neither did I ever conduct a public performance in Zurich again.  The members of this society could not at first be brought to believe that I was in earnest, and I was obliged to bring it home to them by a categorical explanation, in which I dwelt on their slackness and their disregard of my urgent proposals for the establishment of a decent orchestra.  The excuse I invariably received was, that although there was money enough among the musical public, yet every one fought shy of heading the subscription list with a definite sum, because of the tiresome notoriety they would win among the towns-people.  My old friend, Herr Ott-Imhof, assured me that it would not embarrass him in the least to pay ten thousand francs a year to a cause of that sort, but that from that moment every one would demand why he was spending his income in that way.  It would rouse such a commotion that he might easily be brought to account about the administration of his property.  This called to my mind Goethe’s exclamation at the beginning of his Erste Schweizer Briefe.  So my musical activities at Zurich ceased definitely from that time.

[Footnote:  This doubtless refers to the following passage:  ’And the Swiss call themselves free!  These smug bourgeois shut up in their little towns, these poor devils on their precipices and rocks, call themselves free!  Is there any limit at all to what one can make people believe and cherish, provided that one preserves the old fable of “Freedom” in spirits of wine for them?  Once upon a time they rid themselves of a tyrant and thought themselves free.  Then, thanks to the glorious sun, a singular transformation occurred, and out of the corpse of their late oppressor a host of minor tyrants arose.  Now they continue to relate the old fable; on all sides it is drummed into one’s ears ad nauseam—­they have thrown off the yoke of the despot and have remained free.  And there they are, ensconsed behind their walls and imprisoned in their customs, their laws, the opinion of their neighbours, and their Philistine suburbanism’ (Goethe’s Werke, Briefe aus der Schweiz, Erste Abteilung.)—­Editor]