Best Heinemann!
Hearty thanks for your kind letter! But unfortunately the big one, promised to me through a certain lady, I have not received. I waited until to-day in the hope of getting it. Still, above all, I express to you my very great joy in that you (and others also) tell me of your good state of health: certainly that was the pleasantest thing which you could write to me! Now, as I cannot answer you anything about your own affairs — as I have not received the letter in question — and as everything which I could tell you about myself has already been put into my letter to Fischer, I limit myself for to-day to a cordial greeting to you and yours, while I beg Fischer to let you have my letter to him. What I write to him is nearly all for you as well. So let me know more about yourself and Wilhelm, and thus I shall have better occasion for a special answer! Once again, best and most heartfelt thanks for your friendship, and for the continued proofs of the same! Farewell, and let me soon have further particulars.
Your
Richard Wagner.
From the 15th onwards, at Albisbrunn, near Hausen, in the Canton of Zurich.
Müller is going with me to the hydropathic establishment; your old and faithful doctor has got him into a nice state. O you unhappy men, with your poison-dosing doctors! You are all wretched, and no one believes it! It's terrible!
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to His Dresden Friends, Theodor Uhlig, Wilhelm Fischer, and Ferdinand Heine, trans. J. S. Shedlock (Scribner & Welford, 1890), No. 167