In this home, plain in its exterior, but full of richness within, Wagner lived at ease with his wife and her four children.  Von Buelow, the father of two of them, had found strength to be true to his first beliefs in Wagner’s art crusade, and to continue his friendship with the man, though delicacy forbade his entering the home, to which he had regretfully but gracefully resigned his wife, like Ruskin, though not for the same reasons.  Once he broke forth in his dilemma:  “If he were only some one that I could kill, he would have been dead before this.”  But he could not interfere with “the great cause,” and even Liszt, after some estrangement, was reconciled to Wagner.

Here Wagner’s existence went tranquilly and busily on for twelve years, till he was at the threshold of his three-score and ten.  And now the genius, whom we saw but lately juggling with starvation in the slums of Paris, we find a figure of world-wide fame, with an annual income of $25,000 and the ability to travel to Italy in a private car.  But this luxury was his last, for his health was on the ebb.  And though he took a suite of twenty-eight rooms in the Palazzo Vendramin, in Venice, with his wife, his own two children, Siegfried and Eva, aged twelve and fourteen years, Daniela and Isolde, Cosima’s two children by her first husband, and two teachers, four servants, and many guests, this was but a splendid sarcophagus; for here Wagner had but less than half a year to live.  Those who would know more of the daily comforts and suffering of this time, can read it in Perl’s book, “Richard Wagner in Venedig.”  He suffered constantly more and more from heart trouble and other torments.  One day his servant heard him calling, and, hastening to his side, found him on a divan writhing in agony; his last words were:  “Call my wife and the doctor.”  Cosima flew to his aid, but could not hold back the inevitable.  When the doctor came and told her that Wagner had finished his struggle with the arch-critic, Death, she screamed and fainted.  For twenty-six hours she refused to leave his body or to take any food, and could be dragged away only when she had fainted from exhaustion.

And now, the erstwhile exile, living on the pittances he could wheedle from his few disciples, died in the fame of the world.  Three kings sent wreaths to his funeral, and the city of Venice twice asked for the privilege of giving him a final pageant.  But Cosima strangely would have no ceremony at all, and no music.  “She feared it would rend her heart in twain,” says Mr. Finck, “so the procession moved along the canal in solemn silence, broken only by the tolling of the distant bell.”

The railroad station was guarded as for the funeral of a monarch.  The express-train was not stopped at the border of the three countries through which it passed.  When the coffin was taken to the grave in Bayreuth, it was followed by the two large dogs that had shared, as so many of their fellows, the goodness of his large heart.