But no! Next night that obstinate motif returned more clearly than before--I could even see it written out. I started up in feverish agitation, humming it over and--again my decision held me back, and I put the temptation aside. I fell asleep and next morning my symphony was gone for ever. “Coward!” cries the young enthusiast, “brave all and write! Ruin yourself! Dare everything! What right have you to push back into oblivion a work of art that stretches out to you its piteous hands crying for the light of day?” Ah, youth, youth! never hast thou suffered as I suffer, else wouldst thou understand and be silent. Never was I backward, when I stood alone, to bear the brunt of my own actions, never did I fail when my wife stood beside me, alert and hopeful, to help me on, to face with me privation and suffering in the cause of Art. But when she lay half dead, a doctor and three nurses in attendance, when I knew that my musical venture _must_ end in disaster, was I cowardly to hold back? Did I not do more honour to my divine goddess, Music, in crediting her with sweet reasonableness than in treating her as an all-devouring Moloch, greedy for human victims? If I have lately been carried away in writing my trilogy _The Childhood of Christ_, it is that I no longer have these heavy calls upon me, and also that, owing to my warm and generous reception in Germany, I can count upon the performance of my works. Since writing this, M. Benazet of Baden has invited me several times to conduct the annual festival there, and, with unequalled generosity, has given me _carte blanche_ in the engagement and payment of my performers. Each year Germany receives me more cordially; I have been there four times during the last eighteen months. So interested were the blind King of Hanover and his Antigone, the Queen, in my rehearsals that they would appear at eight o’clock in the morning and sometimes stay till noon, as the King said: “In order the better to get at the heart of my meaning and to grasp more thoroughly my new ideas.” How warmly, too, he spoke of my _King Lear_--of the storm, the prison scene, the fateful sorrows of sweet Cordelia. “I did not believe there was anything so beautiful in music,” he said, “but you have enlightened me. And how you conduct? I cannot see you but I feel it. I owe much to Providence,” he added, simply; “this love of music is a compensation for all I have lost.” I never saw Henriette in that part, which was her best, but from her recital of some scenes I can imagine what it must have been. On my last visit to Hanover the Queen asked me to include two pieces from _Romeo_ in my programme, and the King desired me to return next winter to superintend a theatrical performance of the same work, allowing me to requisition artists from Brunswick, Hamburg, and even Dresden. It was the same with the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who said, as I took my leave: