learn this.  Devrient also spoke with great sympathy of the young tenor Schnorr, who, besides possessing admirable gifts, was keenly attracted by my operas.  I was now in the best of tempers, and acted the host to Devrient for all I was worth.  One morning I played and sang to him the whole of the Rheingold, which seemed to give him great pleasure.  Half seriously, and half in joke, I told him that I had written the character of Mime especially for him, and that if, when the work was ready, it was not too late, he might have the pleasure of taking the part.  As Devrient was with me, he had, of course, to do his share of reciting.  I invited all the friends in our circle, including Semper and Herwegh, and Devrient read us the Mark Antony scenes from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.  So happy was his interpretation of the part, that even Herwegh, who had approached the recitation from its outset in a spirit of ridicule, freely acknowledged the success of the practised actor’s skilful manipulation.  Devrient wrote a letter from my house to the Grand Duke of Baden, telling him his impressions about me and what he had found me like.  Soon after his departure I received an autograph letter from the Grand Duke, couched in very amiable terms, in which he first thanked me most profusely for the souvenir I had presented to his wife for her album, and at the same time declared his intention of championing my cause, and, above all, of securing my return to Germany.

From this time forward my resolve to produce Tristan had to be seriously entertained, as it was written in plain letters in my book of fate.  To all these circumstances I was indebted for the continuation of the favourable mood in which I now brought the second act of Siegfried to a close.  My daily walks were directed on bright summer afternoons to the peaceful Sihlthal, in whose wooded surroundings I listened long and attentively to the song of the forest birds, and I was astonished to make the acquaintance of entirely new melodies, sung by singers whose forms I could not see and whose names I did not know.  In the forest scene of Siegfried I put down, in artistic imitation of nature, as much as I could remember of these airs.  At the beginning of August I had carefully sketched the composition of the second act.  I was glad I had reserved the third act with the awakening of Brunhilda for the time when I should again be able to go on with the opera, for it seemed to me that all the problems in my work were now happily solved, and that all that remained was to get pure joy out of it.

As I firmly believed in the wisdom of husbanding my artistic power, I now prepared to write out Tristan.  A certain strain was put upon my patience at this point by the arrival of the excellent Ferdinand Prager from London.  His visit, in other respects, was a source of genuine pleasure to me, for I was bound to recognise in him a faithful and life-long friend.  The only difficulty was, that he laboured under the delusion that he was exceptionally nervous, and that he was persecuted by fate.  This was a source of considerable annoyance to me, as with the best will in the world, I could not muster up any sympathy for him.  We helped ourselves out of the dilemma by an excursion to Schaffhausen, where I paid my first visit to the famous Rhine Falls, which did not fail to impress me duly.