After the Paris articles of 1841 Wagner wrote little or nothing upon the ?sthetics of his art for some ten years. For a time, indeed, he wrote practically no prose of any kind. He left Paris for Dresden in April 1842. At the end of that year he wrote his Autobiographical Sketch for Laube\'s Zeitung für die elegante Welt. His pen was then silent until 1844, in which year we have the Account of the bringing home of Weber\'s remains from London to Dresden, and the Speech at Weber\'s Grave. To 1846 belongs the programme he wrote for the performance of Beethoven\'s choral symphony on Palm Sunday at Dresden.[326] No doubt his duties at the Dresden Opera, which he seems to have fulfilled with great thoroughness and conscientiousness, left him little time for anything else but these and the composition of Tannh?user and Lohengrin. When he at length took up the pen again it was not to expound a system of musical ?sthetics but to preach a social evangel, and to come to the first grips with the new dramatic ideas that had been slowly maturing in him. In May 1848 he submits to the Minister his Project for the Organisation of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony. In September he sketches two operatic poems, Siegfried\'s Death and Friedrich Barbarossa, the former of which he works out in detail by November. Early in January the religious drama Jesus of Nazareth is sketched. In the summer of 1848 he writes the essay on the Wibelungen.

During these years his disc............