Dear Liszt,
I herewith send you my latest finished work; it is a new version of the original article which I sent to Paris last week to have it translated for the feuilleton of the National. Whether you will be pleased with it I do not know, but I feel certain that your nature is at one with mine. I hope you will find in it nothing of the political commonplaces, socialistic balderdash, or personal animosities against which you warned me; but the fact that, in the deepest depth of things, I see what I see is entirely owing to the circumstance that my own artistic nature and the sufferings it has to go through have opened my eyes in such a manner that death alone can close them again.
I look forward either to an entirely useless existence or to an activity that responds to my inmost being, even if I have to exercise it far from all external splendour. In the former case I should have to think of abbreviating that existence. Please address and send the manuscript, together with the enclosed letter, to the publisher Otto Wigand in Leipzig. Perhaps I shall succeed in drawing from my inferior literary faculty some small support for my existence.
Since my last letter, which I posted at the same time as my stormy petition to you, I have had no news from my wife, and am slightly tortured accordingly. From a letter written by Baron Schober to Eck at Zurich, I see with great pleasure that your prospects are cheerful, and that you are resolved to settle in Weimar. I presume that the excellent Princess is also happy and well. Heaven be thanked! Whether you ought to show her my manuscript I am not quite certain; in it I am so much of a Greek that I have not been able quite to convert myself to Christianity. But what nonsense I talk! As if you were not the right people! Pardon me.
Richard Wagner
Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #3835, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 1, No. 25