Most honoured friend,
Please accept - albeit somewhat belatedly - my profound and heartfelt thanks for your beautiful and thoughtful letter!
Whereas I wished then that you would visit me, I now repeat with all the greater insistence the sincere invitation that I extended to you in person when we said goodbye in front of the “Rössli”.
Do come - a single line of advance warning is all I need - Saturday afternoon for example; stay throughout Sunday, and return early on Monday: even a manual worker could manage this, how much easier it must be for a professor.
You will stay with me here, and spend both nights in the Triebschen trust house.
Now let me see the kind of man you are. My experiences with my fellow Germans have been less than wholly delightful so far. Come and restore my not entirely unwavering faith in what I - together with Göthe and a few others - call German freedom. -
Sincere good wishes from
your devoted servant
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 379