Sunday (the 7th of May) was one of the most beautiful days in the year.  I was awakened by the song of a nightingale, which rose to our ears from the Schutze garden close by.  A sacred calm and peacefulness lay over the town and the wide suburbs of Dresden, which were visible from my point of vantage.  Towards sunrise a mist settled upon the outskirts, and suddenly through its folds we could hear the music of the Marseillaise making its way clearly and distinctly from the district of the Tharanderstrasse.  As the sound drew nearer and nearer, the mist dispersed, and the glow of the rising sun spread a glittering light upon the weapons of a long column which was winding its way towards the town.  It was impossible not to feel deeply impressed at the sight of this continuous procession.  Suddenly a perception of that element which I had so long missed in the German people was borne in upon me in all its essential freshness and vital colour.  The fact that until this moment I had been obliged to resign myself to its absence, had contributed not a little to the feelings by which I had been swayed.  Here I beheld some thousand men from the Erzgebirge, mostly miners, well armed and organised, who had rallied to the defence of Dresden.  Soon we saw them march up the Altmarkt opposite the Town Hall, and after receiving a joyful welcome, bivouac there to recover from their journey.  Reinforcements continued to pour in the whole day long, and the heroic achievement of the previous day now received its reward in the shape of a universal elevation of spirits.  A change seemed to have been made in the plan of attack by the Prussian troops.  This could be gathered from the fact that numerous simultaneous attacks, but of a less concentrated type, were made upon various positions.  The troops which had come to reinforce us brought with them four small cannon, the property of a certain Herr Thade von Burgk, whose acquaintance I had made before on the occasion of the anniversary of the founding of the Dresden Choral Society, when he had made a speech which was well intentioned but wearisome to the point of being ludicrous.  The recollection of this speech returned to me with peculiar irony, now that his cannon were being fired from the barricade upon the enemy.  I felt a still deeper impression, however, when, towards eleven o’clock, I saw the old Opera House, in which a few weeks ago I had conducted the last performance of the Ninth Symphony, burst into flames.  As I have had occasion to mention before, the danger from fire to which this building was exposed, full as it was with wood and all kind of textile fabric, and originally built only for a temporary purpose, had always been a subject of terror and apprehension to those who visited it.