Monday, June 10:
R. slept well, but he is not yet starting on his cure. Today I tell Fidi about Achilles and Homer and show him the drawings by Carstens. A picture of Juliet in the Illustrirte Zeitung does not at all displease me, but R. says, “I cannot imagine Juliet ever meditating - just seeking, watching.”
Yesterday R. spoke of the difference between England and Germany; there it is at least feasible that party leaders such as Gladstone now and Cobden previously should voice their opinions clearly to the government and gather a number of people with similar views around them; here such a thing is not feasible - all we can offer is a weakling-like Bennigsen and a few Jews.
R. works. In the afternoon, when I go down to join him, he has written to Mama Lehmann, demanding news of her daughters - he had missed a greeting from them on the 22nd. Telegram to Vogl, singing Siegfried: “If in the last act you should find that your wife has gone to sleep, wake her up and give her my kind regards.”
We stroll about the garden; R. tells me of Renan’s Life of Jesus, which does not displease him; among other things he feels that he has depicted the idea of God the Father very well. Then the second act, up to the last kiss! The beauty of some of the themes one appreciates only after frequent listening, the first few times one is much too moved by it all, the artistic delight comes only retrospectively, and in growing measure.
R. is in an agitated state and would prefer to spend the evening alone with me, and when I am obliged to leave the room for odd moments, I find a sultry atmosphere downstairs on my return. “As pants the hart for cooling streams,” he tells me, “so do I pant for you.”