Dear friend,
Never have I read anything more beautiful than your book! How splendid it all is! I am writing to you quickly now because reading it has left me so inordinately excited that I must first await the return of reason before reading it properly. - I told Cosima that you are second only to her: then, some considerable distance behind, comes Lenbach, who has painted such a strikingly accurate portrait of me! -
Do as she has written - unimportant though it is in relation to the thing itself. -
Adieu! Come over and see us as soon as you can, and we’ll have a real Dionysian revel!
Yours,
R.W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 404