Daniel’s death was a sad experience through which they passed together, and which strengthened the ties of tenderness that drew Liszt to his younger daughter.  The son died in his father’s arms and in her presence.  She had nursed him devotedly in his last illness.  “Cosima tells me,” Liszt wrote, before he had seen Daniel on his sick-bed, “that the color of his beard and of his hair has taken on a touch of brownish red, and that he looks like a Christ by Correggio.”  Together, after Daniel’s death, they knelt beside his bed “praying to God that His will be done—­and that He reconcile us to that Divine will, in according us the grace on our part to accept it without a murmur.”

Such a scene was a memory for a lifetime.  Cosima herself, in one of her letters, gives a beautiful description of her brother’s passage from life.  “He fell back into the arms of death as into those of a guardian angel, for whom he had been waiting a long time.  There was no struggle; without a distaste for life, he seemed, nevertheless, to have aspired ardently toward eternity.”

With a pretty touch Liszt gives an idea of Cosima’s interest in others.  It seems that a certain Frau Stilke was anxious to possess a gray dress of moire antique, and Liszt had persuaded the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein to place the necessary sum for buying it at his daughter’s disposal.  “In order to estimate the cost,” he writes, “Cosette has devised this excellent formula:  It should be a dress such as one would give to persons who want a dress—­only it is necessary that it should be gray and of moire antique to satisfy the ideal of taste of the person in question.”

Wagner does not seem to have seen Cosima after the Von Buelows’ second visit to him at Zurich until they came to him for a visit at Biebrich during the summer of 1862.  What a contrast Cosima must have seemed to poor Minna who, in the same house and but a short time before, had desecrated the manuscript of “Die Meistersinger” by allowing a bread-ball to roll over it!  Wagner’s favorable opinion of Hans and Cosima underwent a great change during their sojourn with him.  In a letter, after speaking of Von Buelow’s depression owing to poor health, he writes:  “Add to this a tragic marriage; a young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented, endowment, Liszt’s wonderful image, but of superior intellect.”

That this woman who so impressed Wagner was in her turn filled with admiration for his gifts appears from two letters which, during the summer of 1862, she wrote from Biebrich to her father.  In one of these she speaks enthusiastically of some of the “Tristan” music.  The other letter concerns “Die Meistersinger:” 

“The ‘Meistersinger’ is to Wagner’s other conceptions what the ’Winter’s Tale’ is to Shakespeare’s other works.  Its fantasy is founded on gayety and drollery, and it has called up the Nuremberg of the Middle Ages, with its guilds, its poet-artisans, its pedants, its cavaliers, to draw forth the freshest laughter in the midst of the highest, the most ideal poetry.”