This letter was written on the 1st April On the 4th of April he sent Fräulein von Meysenbug a letter which was quite melancholy and yet less hopeless. "Dear Fräulein, what pleasure you give, and how deeply you touch me! This is the first time that I have had flowers sent to me, but I know now that these numberless living colours, voiceless though they be, can speak plainly to us. These heralds of spring are blooming in my room, and I have been able to enjoy them for more than a week. It needs must be that, in our grey and painful lives, these flowers should come and lay bare to us a mystery of nature. They prevent our forgetting that it always is, and always must be, possible for us to find, somewhere in the world, life and hope and light and colour. How often do we lose this faith! And how beautiful and happy a thing it is when those who are battling confirm themselves and one another in courage, and by sending those symbols of flowers or books, recall their common pledge. "My health (forgive a word on this subject) has been satisfactory since the new year, save that I have to be careful of my sight. But, as you know, there are states of physical suffering that are almost a blessing, for they produce forgetfulness of what one suffers _elsewhere._ Rather one tells oneself that there are remedies for the soul, as there are for the body. That is my philosophy of illness, and it gives hope for the soul. And is it not a work of art, still to hope? "Wish me strength to write my eleven 'Unseasonable Thoughts' that still remain to be done. Then at last I shall have said everything that weighs upon us; and it may be that after this general confession, we shall feel ourselves liberated, in however slight a degree. "My heartfelt wishes are with you, dear Fräulein." At last Friedrich Nietzsche began to work. His instinct brought him back to the philosopher who had helped his first years. He wished to consecrate to Schopenhauer his third "Unseasonable Thought." Ten years before, he had led a miserable existence at Leipsic; Schopenhauer saved him. His strange gaiety, his lyricism, the irony with which he expresses his harshest thoughts, had restored to him the power of life. If Schopenhauer "troubles you, burdens you," he wrote at that time to a friend, "if he has not the power to raise you, and guide you, through the keenest sorrows of external life, to that sorrowful, but happy state of mind that takes hold on us when we hear great music, to that state in which the surroundings of the earth seem to fall away from us--then I do not claim to understand his philosophy."