Her love for Richter was nearly adoration. Several months after their marriage she wrote her father, "Richter is the purest, the holiest, the most godlike man that lives. Could others be admitted, as I am, to his inmost emotions, how much more would they esteem him!" Richter also wrote to his best friend, Otto, "Marriage has made me love her more romantically, deeper, infinitely more than before." At the birth of their first child, he wrote again to Otto, "You will be as transported as I was when the nurse brought me, as out of a cloud, my second love, with the blue eyes wide open, a beautiful, high brow, kiss-lipped, heart-touching. God is near at the birth of every child."
On Caroline's first birthday after their marriage, he wrote, "I will be to thee father and mother! Thou shalt be the happiest of human beings, that I also may be happy."
"Titan," now ten years in progress, was published, and made a great sensation. The literary world was indignant at the fate of "Linda," his heroine, but all pronounced it a great book,—his masterpiece.
Soon after he removed to Bayreuth, and settled down to earnest work. Almost every day he might be seen walking out into the country, where he rented a room in a peasant's house for quiet and country air. Whenever the day was pleasant he worked out of doors. A son had now been born to him, and life seemed complete. Now he played with his home-treasures, and now talked at table about some matter of art or science that all might be instructed. He was especially fond of animals, having usually a mouse, a tame spider, a tree-frog, and dogs. So good was he to his canary birds that he never left the house without opening the door of their cage that they might fly about and not be lonely. Often when he wrote, they walked over his manuscript, scattering water from the vase and mingling it with his ink.
His son Max, a boy of sixteen, had entered school at Munich. He was a beautiful youth, conscientious, sensitive, devoted to study, and the idol of the household. At first he wept whole nights from homesickness, denying himself sufficient fire, food, and clothing, from a desire to save expense to his parents. He was a fine scholar, but distrusted his intellectual gifts. At the end of a year he came home, pale and worn, and died at the age of nineteen.
To Richter this was a death-blow. He went on writing, while the tears dropped upon his page. He could never bear the sight of a book his boy had touched, and the word "philology," his son's favorite study, cut him to the heart. At the end of three months he wrote to a friend, "My being has suffered not merely a wound, but a complete cutting off of all joy. My longing after him grows always more painful." Broken in health he visited Dresden; but the end was near. The sight of the left eye at first failed him, then the right, till he was left in complete darkness. He still hoped to finish his autobiography, and the "Immortality of the Soul," begun on the very day Max was buried; but this was denied him. Once only did his sorrows overpower him, when pitifully looking toward the window, he cried out as Ajax in the "Iliad":—
"Light! light only, then may the enemy come!"
The devoted wife and two daughters grew unspeakably dear to him. When tired with thinking, he would seat himself at the piano, and play till he, as well as those who heard him, would burst into tears. On the 14th of November, 1825, he sat in his chamber, his youngest child climbing on the back of his chair, and laying her face against her father's. It was only noon, but thinking it was night, Richter said, "It is time to go to rest." He was wheeled into his sleeping apartment, and some flowers laid on the bed beside him. "My beautiful flowers! My lovely flowers!" he said, as he folded his arms, and soon fell asleep. His wife sat beside him, her eyes fixed on the face of the man she loved. About six the doctor arrived. The breath came shorter, the face took on a heavenly expression, and grew cold as marble. The end had come. He was buried by torchlight, the unfinished manuscript of the "Immortality of the Soul" being borne upon his coffin, while the students sung Klopstock's hymn, "Thou shalt arise, my Soul." His more than one hundred volumes and his noble, generous life are his monuments. He said, "I shall die without having seen Switzerland or the ocean, but the ocean of eternity I shall not fail to see."