If you could sometime give me a pleasant surprise by sending the Rinaldo, I should consider it a great favor.

It is only through you that I can keep in touch with music.  We are really living here absolutely songless and soundless.  The opera, with its old standbys, and its novelties dressed up to suit a little theatre, and produced at pretty long intervals, is no consolation.  At the same time I am glad that the court and the city can delude themselves into thinking that they have a species of enjoyment handy.  The inhabitant of a large city is to be accounted happy in this respect, because so much that is of importance in other lands is attracted thither.

You have made a point-blank shot at Alfieri.  He is more remarkable than enjoyable.  His works are explained by his life.  He torments his readers and listeners, just as he torments himself as an author.  He had the true nature of a count and was therefore blindly aristocratic.  He hated tyranny, because he was aware of a tyrannical vein in himself, and fate had meted out to him a fitting tribulation, when it punished him, moderately enough, at the hands of the Sansculottes.  The essential patrician and courtly nature of the man comes at last very laughably into evidence, when he can think of no better way to reward himself for his services than by having an order of knighthood manufactured for himself.  Could he have showed more plainly how ingrained these formalities were in his nature?  In the same way I must agree to what you say of Rousseau’s Pygmalion.  This production certainly belongs among the monstrosities, and is most remarkable as a symptom of the chief malady of that period, when State and custom, art and talent were destined to be stirred into a porridge with a nameless substance—­which was, however, called nature—­yes, when they were indeed thus stirred and beaten up together.  I hope that my next volume will bring this operation to light; for was not I, too, attacked by this epidemic, and was it not beneficently responsible for the development of my being, which I cannot now picture to myself as growing in any other fashion?

Now I must answer your question about the first Walpurgis-night.  The state of the case is as follows:  Among historians there are some, and they are men to whom one cannot refuse one’s esteem, who try to find a foundation in reality for every fable, every tradition, let it be as fantastic and absurd as it will, and, inside the envelope of the fairy-tale, believe they can always find a kernel of fact.

We owe much that is good to this method of treatment.  For in order to go into the matter great knowledge is required; yes, intelligence, wit, and imagination are necessary to turn poetry into prose in this way.  So now, in this case, one of our German antiquarians has tried to vindicate the ride of the witches and devils in the Hartz mountains, which has been well known to us in Germany for untold ages, and to place