My dear Minna,
I have had an excellent night’s sleep, which has calmed and fortified me. What a godsend! May you yourself be granted the same in ample measure! - And so I now feel calm again, lucid and fortified. My view of the beautiful garden and this charming refuge stirs me deeply; that you were suddenly forced to lose all your appreciation of it, after that difficult night, pained me very much. Judge for yourself what I had gone through up to that time; I who had the garden tended in order to spare you now, during your treatment! but - , I am calm and rational; let us not regard anything as having been finally decided. God will help to make our hearts lucid and rational; and everything comes from the heart, both good and bad. Take heart; and whatever may prove inevitable in days to come, never forget, however harsh the trials that lie in store, that within me beats a kind and grateful and loving heart that lives for you alone; be just, and admit that during what for me, too, has been a terrible time, I have ultimately been guided in each and every one of my actions by this heart of mine. But what I have suffered you can judge from the fact that I felt and suffered not only my own afflictions but those of others, too. So I now regard myself as thoroughly purged, and, although I have been unable to spare you many harsh blows of late, my sense of peace has now returned more calming than before, and I can feel nothing but charitableness. But a sense of great solemnity has come over me, and it will for ever remain a part of me. If you yourself are able to gain this same sense of noble solemnity which constitutes true human dignity, we shall have no difficulty in finding ourselves in total agreement on every question. If I may be permitted to draw inferences from my own inner frame of mind, I may indeed hope that the trials which we are yet destined to suffer may assume a salutary form. For now, however, I am firmly and irrevocably resolved to give up all personal contact with our neighbours: only in this way have I found it possible to keep the Asyl as long as we need it. In the end, this will, and must, be agreeable to all the parties concerned.
Well, every good wish! I hope that these few lines may have helped to reassure you!
Fare you well! Take good care of yourself! I shall visit you very soon.
Yours,
R
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 213