And what evenings of ambrosia they were, mingled with the venom of the Master's critiques! He spared no one. He called Monseigneur d'Hulot, a bellicose booby, that same erudite and amiable churchman, who later wrote so discriminatingly of his bitter-tongued friend. An arsenal of opinions passed into the possession of the neophyte. But even at that early age, the formative period, his general culture was wider, more generous than the Master's. Ulick had been a student from the precocious age of seven when he was discovered by his nurse reading La Fontaine's Fables and Pickwick Papers. This bi-lingual training had produced admirable results. He knew two literatures thoroughly; in addition to a fair acquaintance with German and Italian. His mother had insisted on a German university and he selected Jena because of its propinquity to Weimar. Those four years in Germany had been the white stones in his studious career. There he had learned and loved Bach and Beethoven; there he learned to know Goethe, the greatest among moderns--he detested Bismarck and the hard positivism of the Prussian pan-Germanists; Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to come later. His reactions to the system, or lack of system in the case of Nietzsche, was like a crisis in a dangerous fever. He alternated between languour and exaltation. Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from an overflowing goblet. He went twice weekly to Weimar there to study pianoforte and theory with a pupil of Franz Liszt. The drowsy old town on the Ilm, once the Athens of Germany, laid his imagination under a spell. He wandered through the deserted gardens on long summer afternoons, Faust in hand, or he would go to Liszt's house in the woods, hardly a quarter hour's stroll from the garden-house of Goethe, and ponder the extraordinary activities of poet and pianist. In this same Weimar Goethe had led an active, practical life, he, the pagan hedonist, accused by the ignorant of day-dreaming, of being a butterfly voluptuary. He was the real political ruler and administrator of Saxe-Weimar. Liszt, after a life that was Caesarian in its triumphs, had calmly entered into his hermitage, where he taught, prayed and composed. And this is the end of every man's desire, thought the young man, who greatly aspired, though not for the prizes of the market-place. Yonder, at Jena, in Dr. Bingswanger's sanitorium, was hidden the poet-philosopher Nietzsche whose melodious thunder-words had stirred to the core the self-satisfied materialism of his native land. But he was wounded, his eagle wings of rhapsody and rage were broken; they no longer supported him in his flights through the vasty firmament of ideas. Later he was to come to his last asylum in Upper Weimar there to be soothed and watched over by his devoted sister Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. For Ulick he was a living presence, though the soul was absent from his body at Jena.