PROFESSOR IN BERLIN 303 



previously to Berlin to attend the Reichstag, was there seized 

 with apoplexy. His daughter went to the funeral at Karlsruhe, 

 and Helmholtz spent the time in quiet retirement with his 

 children, finding an echo of his deep emotion in music. 



After one of Joachim's Quartett evenings, he writes : 



' Beethoven's Op. 130, which is inconceivably great and 

 solemn, but intensely sad, was clear to me for the first time 

 to-day. The Adagio was incomparably well played; it is a 

 wailing dream of lost ideals, perhaps the prototype of Tristan's 

 Liebestod, a formless surging of infinite melody.' 



The year 1876 was that of the first Bayreuth Festival, which 

 Helmholtz attended with his wife. Both were possessed with 

 the general enthusiasm which the original and powerful con- 

 ceptions of Richard Wagner excited throughout the musical 

 world. 'They ranged themselves among the number of the 

 Master's inspired friends, and welcomed the new intellectual 

 and emotional relations, which, helpful and satisfying, became 

 on both sides one of life's most cherished possessions.' After 

 Helmholtz had left Bayreuth to recruit in the mountains, his 

 wife writes to him on August 30: 'No one, save those who 

 were not present, can deny the power and majesty of the work. 

 What is original and really great is always uncongenial to the 

 mediocre; never have I seen anything more pitiful than the 

 German criticism with its cothurnus and its icy non-recognition. 

 Happily these gentlemen and their sterility cannot prevent the 

 accomplished victory.' 



Helmholtz's many-sidedness became ever greater, the height 

 of his grasp and comprehension of new scientific problems ever 

 more astounding. He followed each new phenomenon with 

 the greatest interest, and was always ready to give his opinion on 

 it at length in writing. When Kuhne, at the beginning of 1877, 

 sends him the Optogram, he welcomes the discovery with 

 enthusiasm, and at once presents it to the Academy ; writing 

 to him on March 13, 1877 : 



1 1 have been immensely pleased with this find ; I had always 

 imagined hypothetically that there must be photo-chemical 

 action in the retina, but had never supposed one would be 

 able to demonstrate it. I am curious now about the action 

 of colour. Boll has already made communications about this 

 to the Academy, and to the Lincei. Red light ought to rein- 



