[...] For a long time I have been quite alone. Karl Ritter has left me to pay his sick mother a birthday visit. When he went I was just recovering from an illness which interrupted the work I had hardly begun. I promised him that I should have a large portion of Tristan finished by the time he returned. However, I have had to make the best of being again confined to my room—this time, as a result of an injury to my leg, I have been held fast to my chair and have had to be carried to bed. This has only just come to an end; a few days ago I had my first ride in a gondola since my illnesses. [...]
I had a visit from an amiable, highly cultivated and intelligent man, a Prince Dolgoruckow. I was pleased when he came but still more pleased when he went away. I am perfectly content not to be entertained and amused. I had not much to read and, indeed, under such conditions, I do not read much. However I ordered W. von Humboldt's letters; they did not please me especially, indeed I found it difficult to read much of them. [...]
Schiller interested me more, and I am reading him now with uncommon pleasure. Goethe hardly holds his own with me beside this unusually sympathetic nature. The man was eaten up with the passion for knowledge! One would imagine he never lived but only pressed towards intellectual light and warmth. His ill-health did not apparently stand in his way here. [...]
Then I have been studying philosophy a great deal and have reached conclusions which supplement and emend my friend Schopenhauer. But I would rather meditate on such matters than write about them. My brain is teeming again, though, with poetic projects. I have been very busy with Parzival; in particular I have an increasingly vital and enthralling conception of a remarkable being, a marvellous female world spirit (the Gralsbotin). If I ever achieve this poem it will be something quite unprecedented. I cannot imagine how long I shall have to live if I am to carry out all my plans. If I really clung to life, I could believe a long one was to be granted me by reason of these numerous projects. [...]
This time as I draw near to the end of Tristan I have a sense of being opposed by Fate; but this cannot make me work on it more cursorily. On the contrary, I compose as if I meant to work on nothing else for the rest of my life. Consequently it will be more beautiful than anything I have ever done. I work with such care that the slightest phrase has for me the significance of a whole act. And since it is Tristan I speak of, I must tell you of my joy at receiving the first copy of the newly-printed poem just at the right moment to send it to you as a birthday present. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 383