Friday, April 29:
The mail brings nothing, and R. is able to do some work. The children still not quite well, and outside snow. Yet the whole world looks unsettled, so much so that R. told me that in his thoughts he had got to the stage of even making do with the Jesuits, who at least would bring peace to the world. “Their power is based, not on their atrocious methods, but on the idea underlying them, their recognition of the wickedness and foolishness of mankind.” “The animal divineness of the Greeks is so strange to us,” he also says, when we again come to that topic.
Letters (in the evening) from Darmstadt, the conductor Marpurg, who reports his enthusiasm for Die Walküre, then (from Cologne) newspapers in which Herr Hiller is castigated for his management (that people send us such things!), then 5 thalers for the performance of the Meistersinger overture in Cologne.