In September 1882 _The Joyful Wisdom_ was published--a book written during one of the happiest periods of his life. It is a veritable fanfare of trumpets announcing the triumphal entry of its distinguished follower _Zarathustra_. With it Nietzsche's final philosophical views are already making headway, and it is full of the love of life and energy which permeates the grand philosophical poem which was to come after it. Disappointed by the meagre success of his works, and hurt by the attitude of various friends, Nietzsche now retired into loneliness, and, settling down on the beautiful bay of Rapallo, began work on that wonderful moral, psychological, and critical rhapsody, _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, which was to prove the greatest of his creations. During the years 1883-84, the three first parts of this work were published, and, though each part was issued separately and met with the same cold reception which had been given to his other works of recent years, Nietzsche never once lost heart or wavered in his resolve. It required, however, all the sublime inspirations which we find expressed in that wonderful _Book for all and None_, to enable a man to stand firmly and absolutely alone amid all the hardships and reverses that beset our anchorite poet throughout this period. It was about this time that Nietzsche began to take chloral in the hope of overcoming his insomnia; it was now, too, that his sister --the only relative for whom, despite some misunderstandings, he had a real affection--became engaged to a man with whom he was utterly out of sympathy; and all the while negotiations, into which Nietzsche had entered with the Leipzig University for the purpose of securing another professorial chair, were becoming ever more hopeless. In the course of this exposition I shall have to treat of the doctrines enunciated in _Thus Spake Zarathustra_--indeed, seeing that this work contains all Nietzsche's thought in a poetical form, it would be quite impossible to discuss any single tenet of his philosophy without in some way referring to the book in question. I cannot therefore say much about it at present, save that it is generally admitted to be Nietzsche's _opus magnum_. Besides the philosophical views expounded in the four parts of which it consists, the value of its autobiographical passages is enormous. In it we find the history of his most intimate experiences, friendships, feuds, disappointments, triumphs, and the like; and the whole is written in a style so magnetic and poetical, that, as a specimen of _belles-lettres_ alone, entirely apart from the questions it treats, the work cannot and ought not to be overlooked.