After we had walked around the outside of the Castle sufficiently, we went inside. It took us a long time to go over it, it was so large.... [T]he finest of everything was the ascending of the tower. Just as we got to the top of it, and had begun to take in the magnificent scenery, an orchestra at a little distance below struck up Wagner's "Kaiser March." It was the one touch which was needed to make the ensemble perfect.... The sun was just setting in a clear sky, and cast long shadows athwart the scene, and I thought I had never seen anything more striking. Then to hear Wagner's Kaiser March by a well-trained orchestra come soaring up, made a combination such as one gets perhaps not more than once in a life-time. The march is superb, so pompous and majestic, and with delicious melodies occasionally interwoven through it. Wagner's melodies are so heavily and intoxicatingly sweet, that they are almost narcotic. His music excites a set of emotions that no other music does, and he is a great original. It has the power of expressing longing and aspiration to a wonderful degree, and it always seems to me as if two impulses were continually trying to get the mastery. The one is the embodiment of all those vague yearnings of the soul to burst its prison house, and the other is the cradling of the body in the lap of pleasure. I always feel as if I should like to swoon away when I hear his compositions. Then his harmonies are so strangely seductive, so complicated, so "grossartig," as the Germans say, and so peculiar! Oh, I have an immense admiration for him! He thinks that music is not the impersonation of an idea, but that it is the idea. << less