"So I shall say no more about you, because it serves no purpose. "Ah! _mon Dieu!_ marry a rich woman! O, why should Gersdorff happen to be of the masculine sex! Marry, and then travel, and enrich yourself with those magnificent impressions which you desire so much! And then ... you will compose an opera which, surely, will be terribly difficult to execute. What Satan was it that made a pedagogue of you? "Now, to end up: next year, in the summer, complete rehearsals (perhaps with orchestra) at Bayreuth. In 1876, the representations. Impossible earlier. "I bathe every day, I could no longer endure my stomach. Bathe you too! And eat meat like me. "With all my heart, "Your devoted, "R. W." Wagner had foreseen that his letter would be useless. He had not foreseen that it would be hurtful. Nietzsche repented that he had drawn forth these tender offers, which he could not accept. In writing, he had been weak; he was ashamed. Finally, the announcement and the approach of the Bayreuth rehearsals overwhelmed him. Should he go? Should he not go? If he did not go, how was he to excuse himself? Could he still hide his thoughts? Should he henceforth acknowledge all? He had commenced a fourth "Unseasonable Thought," _We other Philologists;_ he abandoned it, alleging, to explain this abandonment, weariness and the weight of his University duties. When he speaks thus, Nietzsche deceives either himself or us. Christmas came, and he went to spend ten days at Naumburg with his mother. He was at liberty and could work. But instead of writing, he composed and copied out his _Hymn to Friendship_ for four voices. He spent Saint Sylvester's day in re-reading his youthful compositions: this examination interested him. "I have always seen admiringly," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "how the invariability of character manifests itself in music. What a child expresses musically is in so clear a manner the language of his most essential nature that the man afterwards desires to revise nothing in it." This musical debauch was a bad sign of his condition, a sign of weakness and of fear before his thoughts. Two letters, one from Gersdorff, the other from Cosima Wagner, came to disturb his solitary commemoration. His friends spoke to him of Bayreuth. The reminder plunged him in despair. "Yesterday," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "on the first day of the year, I saw the future with a real fear. It is terrible and dangerous to live--I should envy him who came by death in an honest manner. For the rest, I am resolved to live to an old age. I have my work. But it is not the satisfaction of living that will help me to grow old. You understand this resolution." During January and February, 1875, Nietzsche did not work. He let depression get the better of him. "At very rare moments," he writes, "ten minutes every fortnight, I compose a _Hymn to Solitude._ I will show it in all its dreadful beauty."