Once more he experienced the impressions of his youth. He remembered that the most productive crises of his life had been the most sorrowful, and as a disciple in the school of his former master he recovered his courage. "I have eleven fine melodies yet to sing," he writes to Rohde, in announcement of the work which was to follow. And his Schopenhauer is a melody, a hymn to Solitude, to the daring of a thinker. His heart was full of music at that time. He rested from writing and composed a hymn to Friendship. "My song is for all of you," he wrote to Erwin Rohde. His sister joined him, and the two left Basle and settled together in the country, near the falls of the Rhine. Friedrich Nietzsche recovered the gaiety of his most childish days, partly, no doubt, to amuse the girl who had come so tenderly to join him--_aliis lætus, sibi sapiens,_ according to the maxim that is found written in his diary of the time--but also because he was truly happy, despite his sorrow: happy to be himself, free and unspotted before life. "My sister is with me," he writes to Gersdorff. "Every day we make the finest plans for our future life, which is to be idyllic, hard-working, and simple. All is going well: I have put well away, far from me, all weakness and melancholy." He used to walk with his sister and talk, laugh, dream, and read. What did he read? Schopenhauer, no doubt, and Montaigne, in that small and elegant edition which became a sad reminder: Cosima Wagner had given it to him in former days at Triebschen in gratitude for the dolls he used to bring to the little girls. "Because that man wrote," he used to say, "the pleasure of life on earth has been intensified. Since I have had to do with this free and brave spirit I like to repeat what he himself said of Plutarch--'Je ne le puis si peu raccointer que je n'en tire cuisse ou aile.' If the duty were laid upon me, it would be in his company that I would attempt to live on earth as at home." Schopenhauer and Montaigne: these two ironists, one confessing his despair, the other hiding it, are the men with whom Nietzsche elects to try to live. But he read at the same time with deepest appreciation the work of a younger thinker, one less unfavourable to his aspirations--the trustful Emerson, the young prophet of a young people, one who in his slightest expressions so happily renders the pure emotion that lightens the eighteenth year of a man's life and passes away with that year. Friedrich Nietzsche had read Emerson at Pforta, and he discovered him again in the spring of 1874, and recommended him to his friends.