I am very glad you feel so invigorated physically and so well disposed mentally. Here, after a long winter, we have mild spring weather. We are rejoicing in the first green leaves and in a very well-arranged Northern exhibition that has been opened at Copenhagen. All the French artists of eminence (painters and sculptors) are also exhibiting here. Nevertheless, I am longing to get away, but have to stay. But this cannot interest you. I forgot to tell you: if you do not know the Icelandic sagas, you must study them. You will find there a great deal to confirm your hypotheses and theories about the morality of a master race. In one trifling detail you seem to have missed the mark. _Gothic_ has certainly nothing to do with _good_ or _God_. It is connected with giessen, he who emits the seed, and means stallion, man. On the other hand, our philologists here think your suggestion of _bonus--duonus_ is much to the point. I hope that in future we shall never become entirely strangers to one another. I remain your faithful reader and admirer, GEORGE BRANDES. 15. NIETZSCHE to BRANDES. (Post-card.) _Turin_, May 27, 1888. What eyes you have! You are right, the Nietzsche of the photograph is not yet the author of _Zarathustra_--he is a few years too young for that. I am very grateful for the etymology of _Goth_; it is simply godlike. I presume you are reading another letter of mine to-day. Your gratefully attached N. 16. NIETZSCHE to BRANDES. _Sils-Maria_, Sept. 13, 1888. MY DEAR SIR, Herewith I do myself a pleasure--that of recalling myself to your memory, by sending you a wicked little book, but one that is none the less very seriously meant; the product of the _good_ days of Turin. For I must tell you that since then there have been _evil_ days in Superfluity; such a decline in health, courage and "will to life," to talk Schopenhauer, that the little spring idyll scarcely seemed credible any longer. Fortunately I still possessed a document belonging to it, the _Case of Wagner. A Musician's Problem_. Spiteful tongues will prefer to call it _The Fall of Wagner_. Much as you may disclaim music (--the most importunate of all the Muses), and with however good reason, yet pray look at this piece of musician's psychology. You, my dear Mr. Cosmopolitan, are far too European in your ideas not to hear in it a hundred times more than my so-called countrymen, the "musical" Germans. After all, in this case I am a connoisseur _in rebus et personis_--and, fortunately, enough of a musician by instinct to see that in this ultimate question of values, the problem is accessible and _soluble_ through music. In reality this pamphlet is almost written in French--I dare say it would be easier to translate it into French than into German. Could you give me one or two more Russian or French addresses to which there would be some _sense_ in sending the pamphlet?