who felt friendship as deeply and solemnly as he did could not be common, though he should write no more than a manual of Piedmontese cookery. His days at Triebschen with Wagner and Cosima are the sunniest bay of his life. The affectionate esteem of Rohde and of Burcldiardt, the warm deference of Paul Rée, of Peter Gast, of Stein, of Lanzki, were the best of the few uncertain comforts that humanity gave him. But what pain as well! When Wagner ceased to understand him and he realized what Wagner was (sad discovery: a charlatan, perilous because he was inspired!); when Paul Rée betrayed him, when Erwin Rohde, a professor to the last auricle of his heart, refused the smile and the embrace that would have spared him overwhelming grief; when the others left him alone or treated him as an amiable decoy, as a poetic “original”; then the blood-drops of his wounded heart fell one by one, not outwardly upon his flesh—as in the crucifixions of ancient Rome—but within him. And little by little they killed him: “Where are ye, friends? Come, it is time, it is time!”
That song written at night in Rome within the eternal sound of the fountain—“my heart too is an overflowing fountain”—is perhaps the most ardent declaration of love that genius ever addressed to deaf humanity. But men are prone to prefer a casual flattery to the ennobling influence of a true love. And they gave no heed.
