Best Friend,
You are a dear good creature, and believe me that I deeply recognise the exceptional nature of your interest in me. I almost despair, however, of its being possible to help me! My life is a sea of contradictions, from which I can only hope to emerge with my death. What have you not already done to help me and give my spirit rest! yet ever and again all turns out insufficient. Especial needs, peculiar deferences that I have to observe in my immediate household, unexpected disturbances, and so on, make it hard for me with all my efforts to find a certain rule of conduct.
Coldly as I once left Dresden, could I now depart from Zurich too, where I have shunned no exertion, no sacrificial zeal, at last to recognise that, as erewhile there, so all my sacrifices here have been quite fruitless, and not so much as procured me the satisfaction of discovering in any single thing the traces of my action. I feel it is time to break with this portion of my past, and I would do it if I had not knit a bond in this very place as never before in my life. This is the bond of thanks and heartiest friendship to Your house. Believe my love of truth, that I now am saying no idle thing. The boundless indulgence and untiring proofs of interest that you bestow on me — considering the many points of difference in our natures — must have a deeper ground of sympathy than can be met with often in this life, or saving most exceptionally. In this assurance please behold the only reason of my hesitation what to do, and toward which side I ought to cast my vote.
My wishes and sighs go out toward total repose and retirement: to be sure of enjoying these in the immediate neighbourhood of a family so kind and dear to me as your own, of always finding shelter and sympathy for sorrow and joy in these most intimate relations, would be a happiness no other could replace! But can I throw this whole burden of my existence on you, and must I not perceive, after repeated experiences of the great difficulty of my position, that the load would grow too heavy for you? As a fact, to me it seems time to come to a clear decision on this point, and to think of at least a division of the burden. Only, where should I place its true centre of gravity? At Weimar, or in my refuge with you? [...]
So then to our next meeting! How we shall depart from it: with light or heavy heart, must soon appear. However things may go — we shall not part, I hope! A thousand greetings from
Your
R. W.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 12