"May this plan seem to you worthy of meditation! Your last letter, moving as it was, signified to me that the time had come to unveil it for you. "Shall we not be able to introduce a new form of Academy into the world? 'Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsuchtigster Gewalt, In's Leben ziehn die einzigster Gestalt?' "Thus Faust speaks of Helen. No one knows anything of my project, and now it depends upon you to see that Romundt is advised of it. "Assuredly, our school of philosophy is neither an historical reminiscence nor an arbitrary caprice; is it not a _necessity_ that pushes us on to that road? It seems that the plan of our student days, that voyage which we were to make together, returns in a new form, symbolic now and vaster than it was. On this occasion, I won't leave you in the lurch as I then did. That memory always annoys me. "With my best hopes, your faithful "FRATER FRIEDRICH. "From the 23rd of December till the 1st of January I go to Triebschen, near Lucerne." On the 22nd of December Friedrich Nietzsche left Lucerne: he had received no reply from Rohde. He found the house at Triebschen in high festival with children's games and the preparations for Christmas. Madame Wagner gave him a volume of Stendhal, _Les Promenades dans Rome._ He offered Wagner the famous woodcut of Dürer's of _The Knight, the Dog, and Death,_ on which he had written a commentary for the book he was then preparing, _The Origin of Tragedy:_ "A spirit which feels itself isolated, desperate and solitary," he wrote, "could choose no better symbol than that rider of Dürer's, who, unperturbed by his gruesome companions and yet wholly without hope, pursues his terrible path alone with dog and horse. This rider of Dürer's is our Schopenhauer: he was without hope, but he desired the truth. His like does not exist." Nietzsche would have been happy in the master's house if he had not been expecting Rohde's reply: the waiting worried him. He stopped for a week at Triebschen. Wagner was never done talking about Bayreuth and his vast projects. Nietzsche, too, had his thought which he would have joyfully uttered; but first he wanted his friend's approbation, and that approbation did not come. He left without having received a word or spoken one on the subject.