Really, if I have to do without Liszt for long, I shall pine away. I simply cannot tell you how I long to hear all his works well performed by a good orchestra. Bad as things were with me at St. Gall, the impression the concert there left upon me is unforgettable. I want to hear everything now, especially Hamlet and Dante, but I haven't even got the scores of them! I have just read in a notice of St. Gall in Brendel's Journal that I expressed great recognition of Liszt's compositions! That enraged me so that I almost wrote to Brendel to protest. I feel such a fool with my recognition! As if I could have anything to recognise when I was so utterly carried away by admiration, so touched to the soul, that I could do nothing but revel in this rare, high bliss. But, heavens above! I shall never bring myself again to write in a newspaper. I should not know where to begin or where to leave off! And after all, to whom would I say all this? You know my melancholy opinion about the musical journals' public; my repulsion is unconquerable!
Since our parting I have been greedily devouring the Goethe-Schiller correspondence. It is my way rarely to read the actual words before me, as it were, but to read something into them. Well, I just read here of all the things that Liszt and I could promote, instigate and propagate if we were nearer to each other. And I read also about our rare friendship, too, in letters of gold. So the book became for me a real commemorative feast of our companionship. Since then I can read no more. For when I am tired in the evenings and want to be soothed before going to sleep, I have taken up Walter Scott again. Mostly I avoid exciting reading because I am always involuntarily brought back by it to my future subject-matter and am afraid of being disturbed thereby in my present work. All the same I have read Schack's Voices from the Ganges, quite newly published. You must read them too, even though the lyrics do not belong to the noblest period of Indian poetry.
Siegfried is getting on through sheer compulsion. The scene with the Wanderer is a huge success and now I am busy forging the sword. To-day in the midst of my sufferings Mime cried, "I am as old as the cavern and the forest, but never have I seen a sight like this!" and this made me laugh aloud, so that my wife came in amaze to the sofa where she knew I was lying with my head all confused. So it is indeed. A sudden burst of laughter like that and then a long spell of pain!
Richard Wagner
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Volume 1, ed. Altmann/Hull (London: Dent, 1927), No. 331