We have named the authors who were Nietzsche's favourites at this time: Schiller, Byron, Hölderlin--of these he preferred Hölderlin, then so little known. He had discovered him, as one discovers, at a glance, a friend in a crowd. It was a singular encounter. The life of this child, now scarcely begun, was to resemble the life of the poet who had just died. Hölderlin, the son of a clergyman, had wished to follow his father's vocation. In 1780 he is studying theology at the University of Tübingen with comrades whose names are Hegel, Sendling. He ceases to believe. He comes to know Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, and the intoxication of romanticism. He loves the mystery of nature, and the lucid mind of Greece; he loves them together, and dreams of uniting their beauties in a German work. He is poor, and has to live the hard life of a needy poet. As a teacher, he endures the ennui of wealthy houses in which he is despised generally, and once is loved too much--a brief rapture that ends in distress. He returns to his native village, for its air and its people are pleasant to him. He works, writes at his leisure, but as it pains him to live at the expense of his own family, he goes away again. He has some of his verses published; but the public shows no taste for those fine poems in which the genius of an unknown German calls up the Gods of Olympus to people the deep forests of Suabia and the Rhineland. The unhappy Hölderlin dreams of vaster creations, but goes no farther than a dream: Germany is a world in itself, and Greece is another; the inspiration of a Goethe is needed to unite them, and to fix in eternal words the triumph of Faust, the ravisher of Helen. Hölderlin writes fragments of a poem in prose: his hero is a young Greek, who laments over the ruin of his race and, frail forerunner of Zarathustra, calls for the rebirth of a valorous humanity. He composes three scenes of a tragedy, taking for his hero Empedocles, tyrant of Agrigentum, poet, philosopher, haughty inspirer of the multitude, a Greek isolated among the Greeks by reason of his very greatness, a magician, who, possessing all nature, wearies of the satisfactions which one life can offer, retires to the summit of Etna, sends away his family, his friends, his appealing people, and flings himself, one evening, at sunset, into the crater.