[...] Friend, you must come to me, once for all!—Think it over! I have thought it over already.
As far as I am concerned, the matter is settled. If I have not discovered at last what is the one great and true prize that life may yield, I must be a hardened sinner indeed. A friend, a man responsive, sufficient in himself, and at the same time utterly sympathetic to me! A man who could fail to recognise such a friend must be unworthy of him.
Hans [von Bülow] has often been inclined to be incredulous of my great attachment to him. With the good Hans, however, there are obstacles! And, you are free, and I believed I might take it that you were likely to remain so. But, nevertheless, when I ask you to come and live with me permanently as soon as I am settled, it is, of course, understood that the future is not in any way prescribed. It is enough that one should instinctively regard the arrangement as eternal. I should take it that you belonged to me as my wife does, that we should have everything, fortune and misfortune, equally and in common, everything as a matter of course. [...] Understand me aright—you follow your occupation and I mine, but always like two people belonging to each other as a married couple do. Things will settle themselves. [...]
God, how much I should like to have the poor Puppe too! In matters of this kind my morality is ineradicably naïf! I should think absolutely nothing of it if the girl were to come to me, and be to me just what her pretty little personality is capable of being. But how to find the terminus socialis? Ah, Heaven—it seems to me an absurd pity! [...]
You can have no conception of my poem [The Mastersingers]. I can do no work upon it without growing disgracefully arrogant (how right you are!). It will be the finest product of my genius—I will say no more. [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 512