fe, which at last has
attained a meaning. Thus we get along without the world from which we
had retired entirely. But now listen: you will, I trust, approve of the
sentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce to
you the mother of my son as my wedded wife. This will soon be the case,
and before the leaves fall we hope to be in Mariafeld."

A pleasant view of the new domesticity that had come into Wagner's life
is an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife. He composed with
great secrecy the "Siegfried Idyll," that most royal musical welcome
that ever baby had. Hans Richter collected a band of musical
conspirators and rehearsed the work. On the morning of Cosima's
birthday, the orchestra stealthily collected on the steps of the house,
and with Wagner as conductor, and with Hans Richter as trumpeter,
Cosima's thirtieth birthday was ushered in with benevolent auspices,
the child being then a year old. The Idyll itself, as Mr. Finck says,
"is not merely an orchestral cradle-song; it is the embodiment of love,
paternal and conjugal."

A new reward for his long and stormy career was the realisation of the
Bayreuth dream--the building with hands of a material castle in Spain.
Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his own
works, Wagner was given a home. He and his wife left the villa at
Triebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret. For there he had
been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and
forethought of the devoted Cosima. His new villa at Bayreuth he called
"Wahnfried," setting over the door a fresco of mythological figures,
symbolising music and tragedy; in whom are portrayed Cosima Wagner, his
final ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his first
inspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former being
the portrait of Franz Betz, the singer of the role, and the latter
being the child Siegfried Wagner. Beneath the frescoes he put the
words: "Hier wo mein Waehnen Frieden fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus von
mir benannt,"--which may be Englished: "Here, where my illusions
respite found, 'Illusion-Respite' let this house by me be crowned."

In this home, plain in its exterior, but full of richness within,
Wagner lived at ease with his wife and her four children. Von Buelow,
the father of two of them, had found strength to be true to his first
beliefs in Wagner's art crusade, and to continue his friendship with
the man,