[...] Accept my cordial good wishes for your birthday! It means very much to me that just now, when I am seriously pondering our mutual relations, I should come upon this day, which must certainly be counted as one of the most fortunate days in Nature's calendar. [...]
Your friendship is indispensable to me; I cling to it with all my might.
When am I to see you again, after so long?
Have you an idea, I wonder, of the position I am in? Of what miracles of loyalty and love I need, over and over again, to pluck up courage, to be patient? [...]
I ask once more, then, when shall we meet again? Karlsruhe is more than uncertain; Tristan, altogether, has become shadowy again, a semi-impossibility. Don't wait for some such external occasion to bring you to me. At best, the Tristan time, with the terrible and despairing efforts it will impose on me, is not a fit time for our first reunion. Let your innermost heart bring you to me. I expect my wife about the middle of November. Could I not have you before?—
It is bad enough for me to have to call you, and that you never come of your own accord!
I heard of the marriage of Princess Marie yesterday through Bülow. [...]
[...] I am just on the point of moving into my new quarters, so I have "settled down" once more—without faith, without love or hope! [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 438