Tuesday, September 17:
R. corrects his manuscript and sends it off; I pack a few things, send them into town, and go for a walk with the five children. Lunch with the children. In the afternoon a splendid walk with R. through woods, fields, and villages, lovely autumn air. Right at the start a meeting with Herr von Lerchenfeld, "he looks like a Spanish lackey," who almost became a minister, but nevertheless puts on a friendly air!
Lovely moonlight. "That is the cheerful moon," says R. "The waning moon is the sorrowful one, which utterly dismays one when one suddenly catches sight of it during the night, penetrating to one over city towers, through narrow windowpanes."
This brings him back to Faust. "It is truly a poem of great culture," R. says. "However folklorish its characters, modeled literally on Kasperl, however abstract its objects, it reflects the whole development of mankind."
The preface to Lohengrin he finds very gripping. "How curious," he says, "that I should come up on this again and be reading it just now, when I am so occupied with thoughts of the Roman and German civilizations." The suggestion, mentioned in the newspapers, of a kingdom of Alemannia, with the Grand Duke of Baden as king, pleases him greatly. "That would be the finest German country of all," R. says.