Friday, August 15:
Feast of the Assumption and a very fine day; all morning with the children in the garden of the new house, in the afternoon to the theater and the Bürgerreuth. The theater has made more good progress; the sight of it arouses weighty and noble thoughts in us. R. says he explains his frequently recurring dreams of financial fraud by the nightmare that the sight of the theater gives him: is he himself not perhaps a swindler, as it were?
In the evening we are seized by a longing for Götz von Berlichingen; we read it in the first edition, and R. remarks what a good impression of that time is given by the fact that such a work could make such an impact without an author’s name. My things, they only read Dr. Puschmann about me, and it has become a pastime to provoke me.
The way R. reads is indescribably moving, and tears run down my cheeks almost without cease. (R. reads through Prof. O.’s pamphlet again in order to write to him about it.)