From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When "Der Freischütz" was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline: "I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life. Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be in that which gives you joy too." From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the grave that yawned just before his weary feet. It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with him. "They carry me in triumph," he wrote to Caroline: "they watch for every wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome." In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home. "I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve," he wrote, "But that I never cease to do. All my labours are for you--all my joy is with you." "Can I but be with you on New Year's eve," he wrote again, with that tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character, "I shall be with you all the year." Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease; hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with aching heart in the biography: "To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no, I must. Money must be made for my family--money, man. I am going to London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright, cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freischütz,' was already dead and gone.