The two papers on Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner appear to me to-day to contain self-confessions, above all promises to myself, rather than any real psychology of those two masters, who are at the same time profoundly related and profoundly antagonistic to me--(I was the first to distill a sort of unity out of them both; at present this superstition is much to the fore in German culture--that all Wagnerites are followers of Schopenhauer. It was otherwise when I was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who adhered to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the watchword of the 'fifties). Between _Thoughts out of Season_ and _Human, all-too-Human_ there lies a crisis and a skin-casting. Physically too: I lived for years in extreme proximity to death. This was my great good fortune: I forgot myself, I outlived myself ... I have performed the same trick once again. So now we have each presented gifts to the other: two travellers, it seems to me, who are glad to have met. I remain, Yours most sincerely, NIETZSCHE. 7. BRANDES to NIETZSCHE. _Copenhagen_, March 7, 1888. MY DEAR SIR, I imagine you to be living in fine spring weather; up here we are buried in abominable snowdrifts and have been cut off from Europe for several days. To make things worse, I have this evening been talking to some hundred imbeciles, and everything looks grey and dreary around me, so to revive my spirits a little I will thank you for your letter of February 19 and your generous present of books. As I was too busy to write to you at once, I sent you a volume on German Romanticism which I found on my shelves. I should be very sorry, however, that you should interpret my sending it otherwise than as a silent expression of thanks. The book was written in 1873 and revised in 1886; but my German publisher has permitted himself a number of linguistic and other alterations, so that the first two pages, for instance, are hardly mine at all. Wherever he does not understand my meaning, he puts something else, and declares that what I have written is not German. Moreover, the man promised to buy the rights of the old translation of my book, but from very foolish economy has not done so; the consequence is that the German courts have suppressed my book in two instances as pirated(!)--because I had included in it fragments of the old translation--while the real pirate is allowed to sell my works freely. The probable result of this will be that I shall withdraw entirely from German literature. I sent that volume because I had no other. But the first one on the _émigrés_, the fourth on the English and the fifth on the French romanticists are all far, far better; written _con amore_.