ttle as
a century ago, how much our world would be the gainer! If Richard
Wagner had only known how and what to eat and how to avoid catching
cold every other month, we would not have so many dull, dreary places
to overlook in "The Ring," and would, instead, have three or four more
immortal tone-dramas than his colds and indigestions gave him time to
write. One hates to think what Poe might have done in literature if he
had taken a cure and become a chip of the old oaken bucket.
Tuberculosis, they now say, is preventable. If only they had said so
before the death of Keats!...

It makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in a
stuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how the
sole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game
of _l'hombre_ with the philosopher Schelling. And then he wondered
why he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever
catching cold (_einen starken Schnupfen_); and why his head was so
thick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. In his
correspondence with Goethe it is exasperating to observe that these
great poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight change
of temperature or humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdraw
their health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it would
have been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made
them health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows of
outrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourish
inspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case their
published works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the
masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of
their _Saemmtliche Werke_ than they do. And the second part of "Faust"
would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom
having wings to match those of the spirit.

"Ach! zu des Geistes Fluegeln wird so leicht
Kein korperlicher Fluegel sich gesellen."

Some of the most opulent and powerful spirits ever seen on earth have
scarcely done more than indicate what kind of birthrights they
bartered away for a mess of pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased to
write poetry after thirty because, by dissipating his overplus of
life, he had too grievously wronged what he described as

"This body that does me grievous wrong."

After all, there are comparatively few masters, since the glory that
was Greec