Tuesday, June 24:
Midsummer Day! R. dreamed that he was at the Staff estate and wished to draw a curtain, and everything fell down. All kinds of domestic affairs for me, for him the revision of his article. Many gloomy reflections on his isolation: no one is really close to him, he has to show consideration on all sides.
In the evening he reads to me Carlyle on Dante in Hero-Worship; what he has to say in general about poets is rather amateurish, marred by the same weakness - the lack of basic philosophical training - which is almost invariably discernible whenever he is talking in general terms; but his judgment of Dante as a person and of his poetry, and also a few things about poetic art, please us greatly.
Today is Midsummer Day, but it is not the Midsummer Day melody which haunts me all day long but, rather, Sieglinde’s words to Siegmund, her description of Wotan; these glorious scenes and sounds are like guardian spirits to whom my day is dedicated - I feel then that the common round cannot affect it.