Towards mid-December, he accompanied Richard Wagner to Mannheim, where a two days' festival was being devoted to the works of the master. "Oh, what a pity you were not there!" he wrote to Erwin Rohde. "All the sensations, all the recollections of art, what are they compared to these? I am like a man whose ideal has been realised. It is Music, and Music alone! ... When I say to myself that a certain number of men of the generations to come--at least some hundreds among them--will be moved by this music as I am myself, I cannot augur for less than an entire renewal of our culture!" He returned to his house in Basle: but the impression of his days in Mannheim remained with him. The details of his everyday life caused him a strange and tenacious disgust. "All that cannot be translated into music," he wrote, "is repulsive and repugnant to me.... I have a horror of reality. Or, rather, I no longer see anything of the real, it is only a phantasmagoria." Under the stress of this emotion he acquired a clearer view of the problem which occupied him, he formulated more clearly the principle for which he was seeking. To "teach," to "uplift" men, what does that mean? It is to dispose their minds in such sort that the productions of genius will be assured, not of the understanding of all, for that cannot be, but of the respect of all. As in the preceding years, Richard and Cosima Wagner invited him to spend Christmas at Triebschen. He excused himself; the work of his lectures occupied all his time. He offered Cosima Wagner, by way of homage, a musical fantasy on Saint Sylvester's Night, composed some weeks earlier. "I am very impatient to know what they will think of it down there," he wrote to Rohde. "I have never been criticised by any competent person." In reality, good judges had already often discouraged his musical enterprises, but he soon forgot their vexatious advice. On the last day of 1871, his book appeared: _Die Gebürt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music)_. The sub-title which the current editions give, _Hellenism and Pessimism,_ was added in 1885 on the issue of the second edition. Friedrich Nietzsche sent the first copy to Richard Wagner, from whom he received almost at once a frenzied letter. "DEAR FRIEND,--I have never read a finer book than yours. It is all splendid! At this moment, I write to you very hurriedly because the reading has profoundly moved me, and I expect that I wait for the return of my sang-froid to re-read you methodically. I said to Cosima: After you, he it is whom I love most; and then, at a long distance, Lenbach, who has made so striking and so true a portrait of me.... Adieu! Come soon to see us! "Yours, "R. W." On the 10th of January Wagner wrote again: