“Perhaps this death is the greatest grief that could have come to you. And now, dear friend, you have experienced for yourself--I gather from the tenor of your letter--why our Schopenhauer esteems pain and trouble a great gift of fate, the δεύτερος πλοῦς to the resigning of the will. You too have felt and lived through the enlightening, deeply quieting and settling power of pain. It is a time in which you can yourself try out the teaching of Schopenhauer. If the fourth book of his masterpiece now make on you an ugly disturbing downweighing impression, if it have not the power to uplift you, to carry you through outer violent grief to that chastened yet serene mood that comes over us as we listen to noble music, to that mood in which one feels the earthy shell to have dropped from one,--then I too will have no more of this philosophy. Only the deeply suffering can and may speak the final word on such matters. The rest of us standing in the current of things, only longing for that denial of the will as for the blessed isles, can not judge whether the solace of such philosophy is adequate to times of deep sorrow.”[12] And some three years later, Nietzsche invalided home from the hospital corps of the Prussian army writes to this same friend at the front: “This morning brought me the happiest surprise and a relief from much inquietude and anxiety--your letter.... Everything that you write affects me deeply, above all the sincere earnest tone with which you speak of this test by fire of our common philosophy of life. I too have been through a like experience, for me too these months have proved a time in which my beliefs have shown themselves deep-rooted. One can die with them; that means much more than saying, one can live by them.”[13] One may die by the light of Schopenhauerian principles! To die by them--the taunt comes from an older Nietzsche--is all that one can do with them. But by this later time, dying, voluntary dying, dying with the breath still left in the body--all this has lost its charm for Nietzsche. He is now all for living; for more than living, for fighting; for conquering; for, if need be, killing. “One who like me,” he writes in these later days, “has long busied himself with curious interest in thinking out pessimism to its bitter end ... has probably in this very pursuit--without precisely having willed it--turned his eyes toward the opposite ideal: toward the ideal of the most domineering, the most living, the most aggressive of men, toward him who has not merely reconciled and adjusted himself to things as they are and have been; but who wants more of them, just as they are and have been--more in all eternity, crying insatiably _da capo_ not to his own life only, but to the whole scene and all the play.”