Friedrich Nietzsche read greedily the two thousand pages of this metaphysical pamphlet, which had struck at all the naïve beliefs of the nineteenth century with terrible force, and had struck from the head of puerile humanity all its crown of dreams. He experienced a strange and almost startling emotion. Schopenhauer condemns life, but so vehement an energy is in him that in his accusing work it is yet life that one finds and admires. For fourteen days Nietzsche scarcely slept; he went to bed at two o'clock, rose at six, spent his days between his book and the piano, meditated, and, in the intervals of his meditations, composed a _Kyrie._ His soul was full to the brim: it had found its truth. That truth was hard, but what matter? For a long time his instinct had warned and prepared him for this. "What do we seek?" he had written to his sister. "Is it repose or happiness? No, truth alone, however terrible and evil it may be." He recognised the sombre universe of Schopenhauer. He had had a presentiment of it in the reveries of his boyhood, in his readings of Æschylus, of Byron, and of Goethe; he had caught a glimpse of it across the symbolism of Christianity. What was this evil Will, the slave of its desires, but under another name, that fallen nature pictured by the Apostle, yet more tragic, now that it was deprived of the divine ray which a Redeemer had left to it? The young man, in alarm at his inexperience and his temerity, had recoiled before so formidable a vision. Now he dared to look it in the face. He no longer feared, for he was no longer alone. By trusting in Schopenhauer's wisdom he satisfied at last one of the profoundest of his desires--he had a master. He struck even a graver note in giving to Schopenhauer the supreme name in which his orphaned childhood had enshrined a mystery of strength and tenderness--he called him his father. He was exalted; then, suddenly swept by a desolating regret. Six years earlier Schopenhauer still lived; he might have approached him, listened to him, told him of his veneration. Destiny had separated them! Intense joy mixed with intense sorrow overwhelmed him; and he was shattered by a nervous excitement. He grew alarmed, and it needed an energetic effort on his part to bring him back to human life, to the work of the day, to the sleep of the night.