Full of hope, I started in July on my holiday, which consisted of a journey to Marienbad in Bohemia, where my wife and I intended to take the cure.  Again I found myself on the ‘volcanic’ soil of this extraordinary country, Bohemia, which always had such an inspiring effect on me.  It was a marvellous summer, almost too hot, and I was therefore in high spirits.  I had intended to follow the easy-going mode of life which is a necessary part of this somewhat trying treatment, and had selected my books with care, taking with me the poems of Wolfram von Eschenbach, edited by Simrock and San Marte, as well as the anonymous epic Lohengrin, with its lengthy introduction by Gorres.  With my book under my arm I hid myself in the neighbouring woods, and pitching my tent by the brook in company with Titurel and Parcival, I lost myself in Wolfram’s strange, yet irresistibly charming, poem.  Soon, however, a longing seized me to give expression to the inspiration generated by this poem, so that I had the greatest difficulty in overcoming my desire to give up the rest I had been prescribed while partaking of the water of Marienbad.

The result was an ever-increasing state of excitement.  Lohengrin, the first conception of which dates from the end of my time in Paris, stood suddenly revealed before me, complete in every detail of its dramatic construction.  The legend of the swan which forms such an important feature of all the many versions of this series of myths that my studies had brought to my notice, exercised a singular fascination over my imagination.

Remembering the doctor’s advice, I struggled bravely against the temptation of writing down my ideas, and resorted to the most strange and energetic methods.  Owing to some comments I had read in Gervinus’s History of German Literature, both the Meistersinger von Nurnberg and Hans Sachs had acquired quite a vital charm for me.  The Marker alone, and the part he takes in the Master-singing, were particularly pleasing to me, and on one of my lonely walks, without knowing anything particular about Hans Sachs and his poetic contemporaries, I thought out a humorous scene, in which the cobbler—­as a popular artisan-poet—­ with the hammer on his last, gives the Marker a practical lesson by making him sing, thereby taking revenge on him for his conventional misdeeds.  To me the force of the whole scene was concentrated in the two following points:  on the one hand the Marker, with his slate covered with chalk-marks, and on the other Hans Sachs holding up the shoes covered with his chalk-marks, each intimating to the other that the singing had been a failure.  To this picture, by way of concluding the second act, I added a scene consisting of a narrow, crooked little street in Nuremberg, with the people all running about in great excitement, and ultimately engaging in a street brawl.  Thus, suddenly, the whole of my Meistersinger comedy took shape so vividly before me, that, inasmuch as it was a particularly