He wished to write an open letter to his friends, known and unknown; but he would only call them at the favourable moment, and till then would keep his secret. "Give me two years," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff enthusiastically and mysteriously, "and you will see a new conception of antiquity diffuse itself, which must bring a new spirit into the scientific and moral education of the nation!" Towards mid-December he believed that the moment had come. Erwin Rohde wrote him a melancholy letter, a very feeble echo of the passionate letters which Nietzsche had addressed to him. "Soon we shall need cloisters ..." he said, repeating the same idea expressed six months earlier by his friend. It was but a word; Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it a sign of spontaneous agreement, a presage of enthusiastic collaboration, and he wrote in a joyous transport: "DEAR FRIEND,--I received your letter and I answer it without losing a minute. Above all I wish to tell you that I feel _altogether_ like you, and that we shall be, in my opinion, very weak, if, abandoning our feeble complaints, we do not deliver ourselves from ennui by an energetic act.... I have at last understood the bearing of Schopenhauer's judgments on the philosophy of the universities. No radical truth is possible there. No revolutionary truth can come out from there.... We shall reject this yoke; to me that is certain. And we shall then form a new Greek academy: Romundt will be of our company. "You know, since your visit to Triebschen, the projects of Bayreuth. For a long time, without confiding in any one, I have been considering whether it would not be suitable for us to break with philology and _its perspectives of culture._ I am preparing a great _adhortatio_ for all those who are not yet completely captured and stifled by the manners of this present time. What a pity that I must write to you, and that for long we have not been able to examine in conversation each of my thoughts! To you who know not their turnings and their consequences, my plan will perhaps appear as an eccentric caprice. That, it is not; it is a necessity. "... Let us try to reach a little island on which there will be no longer need to close one's ears with wax. Then we shall be one another's masters. Our books, from now till then, are but hooks to catch our friends, a public for our æsthetic and monachal association. Let us live, let us work, let us enjoy for one another's sake; in that manner only, perhaps, shall we be able to work for the _whole._ I may tell you (see how serious is my design) that I have already commenced to reduce my expenses in order to constitute a little reserve fund. We shall gamble in order to try our 'luck'; as to the books which we shall be able to write, I shall demand the highest honorarium as a provision for coming times. In brief, we shall neglect no lawful means of success in founding our cloister. We also have our duty for the next two years!