"I have very often suffered from a heavy and depressed mood. But more than once inspiration has returned to me; my manuscript has benefited from it. I have given the go-by to philology in the most cavalier fashion. They may praise me, they may blame me, they may promise me the highest honours, they may talk as they choose; I turn my back upon it. Every day I go deeper into my philosophic domain, and I begin to have confidence in myself; better still, if I am ever to be a poet, from to-day I feel myself disposed towards it. I do not know, I have no means of knowing, whither my destiny guides me. And nevertheless, when I examine myself, everything is in perfect accord within me, as though I had followed some good genius. My ends are extremely hidden from me; no concern for office, for hierarchic honours, directs my efforts; and none the less I live in a surprising condition of clarity, of serenity. What a sensation it is to see one's world before one, a fine globe, round and complete! Now it is some fragment of a new metaphysic, now it is a new æsthetic which grows up within me, now another idea claims me, a new principle of education which entails the complete rejection of our Universities and gymnasia. I never learn any fact but it immediately finds a good place in some corner that has been long prepared for it. This sentiment of an interior world which springs up within me I feel in all its force when I think not coldly, but quietly and without exaggerated enthusiasm, on the history of these last ten months, on these events which I consider as the instruments of my noble designs. Pride, folly, are words that feebly express my condition of mental 'insomnia.' "Ah, how I desire health! As soon as one has something in view which must last longer than oneself--how one gives thanks for every good night, for every mild ray of sun, even for every occasion on which one digests aright!" On the 10th of April, Nietzsche had returned to Basle. He gathered his notes together, re-read them for the last time, and fixed definitely the plan of his work. He allowed those digressions upon war, slavery, the city, of which we have already given some extracts, to drop, and--Wagner, it is said, desired it--limited himself to his first subject: ancient tragedy, the model and precursor of German musical drama. Wagner's advice, Madame Förster-Nietzsche insinuates, was not altogether disinterested; it suited him that his disciple's first work should be consecrated to his fame. This has an air of probability; still it certainly seems that Nietzsche had let himself be captured and seduced by too many ideas, that he had not so much amassed the matter for one book as begun, rather at hazard, a whole series of studies in æsthetics, history, and politics. He needed to restrict himself, and yet could not make up his mind to it. If Wagner helped him here, he did well. Perhaps we owe the happy completion of this book to him--the only real book which Nietzsche ever completed.