Best thanks for the splendid flowers! The old plant, well looked after, is as magnificent as ever; so I still shall keep it. — A good thing I finished the act yesterday and sent it off. I should have been unable to work to-day; the catarrh has increased, and I am not free from a touch of fever. Otherwise things go well — and brightly; how go they in the neighbour-land? —
Source: Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), No. 46