My dear and gracious King,
I send you these tears of the most heavenly emotion in order to tell you that the marvels of poesy have entered my poor loveless life as a divine reality! - And this life, with its final outpouring of verse and of music, now belongs to you, my gracious young King: dispose of it as you would of your property!
In the utmost ecstasy, faithful and true
Your
subject
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 298