There is nothing ambitious, nothing pretentious here. It is just a plain, dignified gentleman’s home, _entre cour et jardin_; the court surrounded on three sides by shady alleys, an avenue of horse-chestnuts leading to a little forecourt in which the central ornament is a bust of King Louis of Bavaria, after Liszt, Wagner’s greatest friend, and certainly a powerful protector, who would have done so much more for him had he been able. Over the doorway is a sgraffito, “Wotan the Wanderer”; no other decoration save only in great letters the famous inscription, “Hier we mein Wähnen Frieden fand WAHNFRIED sei dieses Haus von mir benannt.” “Here where my wild dreams peace attained WAHNFRIED [Dreams-Peace] be this house by me named.” A poor jingle of a translation, but perhaps the original is not to be rendered in another tongue. But what a tinge of melancholy lies in it! A long day of struggles and misery, an evening of peace and happiness, and then suddenly at Venice—the Night! Few people will deny that in a man’s home much of himself will be found reflected. I am not now speaking of those houses built to a pattern, even if it be a fanciful one, and adorned and furnished by some famous decorator: in these the reflection is that not of a mind, but of a firm, and there is a brotherly or at farthest a cousinly likeness between all those that are the work of the same partners: the difference is mainly one of pounds, shillings, and pence: even the books in the library look as if they had been ordered by the yard. The piano is placed for looks, not for sound. The pictures are chosen by the fashionable dealer of the day. The house of a man of character and distinction bears the impress of his own imagination. Especially is this the case when he himself has built it. In Wahnfried everything speaks to you of Wagner. The design was his: the admirably proportioned rooms were planned and measured by him: every detail was thought out with strenuous care and loving foresight. The library, it has been said, “bears eloquent testimony to the universality of Wagner’s genius.” The works of art, the knick-knacks, all tell their story. There are several quite admirable portraits by Lenbach, pictures that will live; one portrait especially of Frau Wagner is a masterpiece that will not be denied.