Many thanks, you dear bringer of Christmas cheer. You come like a true saviour to me, and I have placed you on my work table as on an altar. Thanks, a thousand thanks, to you for coming. I was very lonely. If I had a sweetheart, I think I should never write to her, and to you also I must write little, I mean, writing apart from relating external events. The events I experience within me I can write of all the less, because I could not even tell them. So necessary is it to me to feel or to act.
Richard Wagner
Source: Project Gutenberg eBook #3835, Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 1, No. 141