I have just been reading the holy "Ferdinand" and found it very beautiful and touching. Perhaps it was my frame of mind. Were death foretold me surely for this year, I should embrace it as the most fortunate and consecrate of all my life. Only the uncertainty, how long remains for us to live, makes us frail and prone to sin; that certainty, however, would hallow me completely. — How were it to be gained, that certainty so ardently I yearn for? —
Source: Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), No. 53