How perfect is the feeling with which, in the company of a familiar friend of our own choice—we wander through the shaded paths and sweet groves of our sanctuary. Nor is it necessary that the chosen comrade should be himself a botanist or a gardener. Sympathy is all that is asked of him, and that he will not deny. Indeed, there is something in the worship of the great god Pan, and in the living, growing temples which are raised in his honour, which makes for all that is best in the intercourse between man and man. A beautiful view, a discreet arrangement of flowers and graceful foliage, will rouse congenial memories of books, of poetry, of pictures, and sometimes even of melody. The sight of a plant recognized even by the unskilled as an old friend of some distant clime, seen again after many years, will excite a whole train of recollections fragrant with the perfume of half-forgotten travels and adventures. So may two greybeards sit happily in some remote nook, the home of fairies and dryads, where the trees whisper old thoughts and call up sympathetic talk, broken and yet stimulated afresh by “brilliant flashes of silence.” [Illustration: FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. _From a photograph._ [_To face p. 212._] All the better is this _solitude à deux_ if there should be the tinkling music of a tiny stream, with the electric gleam of a kingfisher darting across some idle sunlit pool. All these wield that magic power which, for the nonce charming away the wrinkles of time, transports us across the long years back to the days when the world and we were young and life meant hope. Rare, indeed, and very precious are such dreamy talks and silences. We can hardly rate their value too highly. The crazy poet-philosopher Nietzsche was not far wrong when, in a letter to Erwin Rohde, he wrote: “Eternally we need midwives in order to be delivered of our thoughts. Most people go to a public-house, or to a colleague whose mind is solely occupied with the interests of their calling, and there, like so many small cats, they tumble about all their thoughts and tiny schemes. But woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend’s presence!” It was a fine thought of his to elevate friendship to the rank of a goddess. But, alas for the inconsistencies of genius! Few of Nietzsche’s hot friendships had any lasting power. Rohde himself, Rée and others faded out of his life. But no change was so violent as that which occurred in the relations between the philosopher and the tone-poet Wagner. The historic friendship—born of an admiration for Schopenhauer shared by both, and of an adoration by Nietzsche of Wagner’s music—ripened so quickly and was so beautiful, that it ought to have lived with their lives; but this alliance between a budding youth and an older, already famous man came to the saddest end.