Friday, February 10:
R. exclaims to me: "You are my good half; I nothing without you, you nothing without me." He has dreamed of my father and recalls his remark that Beethoven was not a Catholic: "Natural magic, which reveals itself to the world without divine help, that is something they fear."
Another meditative letter from Dr. Herrig. R. says that the difference between North and South Germany can be seen in these two: the young man from Wurzburg writes a play, the young man from Berlin ponders how the spoken drama is to be saved. "Write a good play," R. laughs, "and it is saved."
R. works on his march; I write to Klindworth, P. Cornelius, for the birthday poem, to England, and to Frau Wille.
The news of the French soldiers grows ever worse; it makes me indignant to think that such people fought our noble Germans. R. says that when one looks at these people, one has the feeling that the human race is a degraded form of the animal world, as if, so to speak, it were out of this rottenness that the true human being first emerged.
Visit to Countess B., who also tells me the saddest details about these people. As always when I return home I am filled with the joy of reunion, and R., giving me his hand, tells me we are truly happy in spite of everything!
The evening, however, lapsed into a mood of melancholy. Loldi began to cry out of naughtiness; I had to punish her, which always puts me in a fever, because I never do it in anger. A letter from Prof. Nietzsche, who is traveling to Italy without coming to say goodbye to me, arouses troubled thoughts in R.; and, finally, Richter gives us the impression of being tired of living.
We, R. and I, are brought nearer to each other as much by melancholy as by cheerfulness; nothing but death can part us, and not even this: we vow not to part for even an hour of our life.
In the evening, when R. accompanied me to my room, he saw the hyacinths in it and said that these flowers always reminded him of Manfred and Paradise and the Peri, which he read in his uncle Adolph's translation in Leipzig, at a window at which flowers of this sort were standing. He does not like their scent, and nor do I; I only have them in the room because it touches me to see such plants suddenly spring into bloom after the long winter. Also, it had been an attentive gesture on Jakob's part to place them in my room, and I did not wish to spurn it.
Kos our Moblol.