should call it
Meyerbeer," he says, "inasmuch as it ignores the wants of the soul and
seeks to gratify the eye and ear alone." After all, was it the mere
gratification of the senses that he really longed for? His aspirations
grew in the natural soil of those life-feelings which dictate that
religion and morality shall not destroy natural impulses, but sanctify
them. Before his soul stood a pure, chaste, maidenly image of
unapproachable and intangible holiness and loveliness. In his own
words, his nature passionately and ardently embraced the outward forms
of this conception whose essence was the love of all that is noble and
pure. No other artist ever possessed a deeper sense of the need of our
time. With this protest against the violence done our purely human
nature, he places us again on a solid footing and symbolizes in art
the highest accomplishment of religion--regeneration by knowledge. It
is to this that we owe the regeneration of our national life. The
religious element of our nature has preserved us and made us a great
nation.

He confesses he had been so intensely engrossed in composing
"Tannhaeuser," that the nearer he approached the end, the more the
idea possessed him that sudden death would prevent its completion. As
he wrote the last note it seemed to him as though his life had been
in danger till then. The "Flying Dutchman" was a protest against the
purposeless wanderings of the human mind in every external department
of knowledge, while "Tannhaeuser" was a bold historical protest
against all that would subject the hidden sense of truth in our nature
to violent interpretation and arbitrary dogmas. From this time forth
his sphere became the purely human, and in this too he shows us by
his powerful art that which is indispensable and eternal in human
existence joined with the complete realization of the only natural way
to develop all our qualities. We have come to "Lohengrin," conceived
in 1847, and completed in its instrumental parts in March, 1848. It
was in truth "his child of pain."

After the completion of "Tannhaeuser," his native sense of humor
prompted him to design a satirical play on the "Saengerkrieg auf
Wartburg," namely the "Meistersinger von Nuernberg," of which, more
further on. The painful experience of being misunderstood in all his
earnest efforts as a man and as an artist, his failure to make
the assistance he longed to give acceptable, drove him back with
passionate vehemence into a