[...] So you are writing books for children? Good luck to you! What childishness would one not indulge in for 500 francs! I have been writing for the [Dresdener] Abendzeitung, all in vain. Do you know, dearest Brother Lehrs, your letter has quite relieved my mind about you? All through it I can see your independent manly spirit, proving to me that a sluggard's life is not the summit of earthly bliss. With what delicate sensibilities we are endowed, you and I, for this rough-and-tumble life, so that we can revel in the warmth of the weakest ray of sunshine, while whole oceans of light get no response but sweat from the usual run of fools. Ah, how happy we are while we can find a grain of inner satisfaction, and how I shudder when I think that I was once given up to a banal, boring "happiness" where—instead of in hens and goats—I had to seek satisfaction in people with handles to their names and—asses! Laube has become such an one! [...]
My future lies in the hands of the theatrical robber band. God enlighten their Excellencies and open their hearts to virtue. Amen [...] Paris, Dresden or Schilda—it's all much the same to me now, if I know my own heart. I don't care for Paris—I doubt if I can love any place in the world. My heart finds no refreshment in men and buildings—I want nature—and friends. [...] I have no geographical preferences and, as for my Fatherland, apart from its lovely ranges of hills, vales and woods, I rather dislike it than otherwise. They are an accursed people, these Saxons, greasy, paunchy, ill-bred, lazy and coarse—what have I to do with them? The apparent patriotism of my last letter was all right for Kietz, though for the matter of that he has passed from provincialism to cosmopolitanism in Paris. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 1, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 68