Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but "Der Freischütz," and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers always grow of their spoiled children of fortune. His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart, was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he cried: "Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!" His effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long away, he answered: "Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after day." "God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!" he wrote once more. "I count days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible yearning I have never known before." At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing his home again. At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody, but, as his son writes: "At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death--for the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more than the notes for the voice." Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to his future.