Nietzsche is the mischievous boy in school of the old philosophers. He insists upon knocking down with hard, well-made paper balls, the idols they set up. He is brilliant phrase maker. He transforms the heavy, slightly ponderous German tongue to frothiness of French. He stands behind it with up-lifted whip, cruelly lashing it to fresh agilities. His word acrobatics are worth considering. Yet he is seldom pleased with the result. He can not, like little people, rejoice in what he himself has done. The outlines of words as they are do not suit him. He shades them. He sets them differently. He cuts off edges. He insists they no longer falsify his thought. No written statement suits him. He wishes it a little different. The exactitude of his thinking is superb. It is difficult for words, whose sense boundaries are not exact, to express it. Wonderful, lightening clear, shining, far, problematical glimpses he flashes forth. In certain, to him inconsequential asides, he is Prophet of Hebraic height. It is in words like these, of great thinkers, with prodigious power of self-projection, that living men gain idea of the civilizations that are on the way. There are few more distinguished literary critics than Nietzsche. His seeing is revealing. He has few superiors in sympathetic appreciation of the printed word in hands of a master. He has fine ear for music of the sentence, too. No subtlety, no fineness, is lost. What he says about Petronius makes me long to read him again after the years. It fills me with zest, with pleasure. “_Wer endlich dürfte gar eine deutsche Übersetzung des Petronius wagen der mehr als irgend ein grosser Musiker bisher der Meister des presto gewesen ist, in Erfindung, Einfallen, Worten:—was liegt zuletzt an allen Sumpfen der kranken, schlimmen Welt, auch der Alten Welt, wenn man wie er, die Füsse eines Windes hat, den Zug und Athen, den Befreienden Hohn eines Windes, der alles gesund macht indem er alles laufen macht!_” Nietzsche wants to know who would dare make a translation into German of this book by Petronius, who more than any other of the great musicians, was master of the _presto_! What magnificent things Nietzsche writes about him! He insists he had the swift feet of the wind, and the wind’s breath, which clears and makes clean, with a scorn that sets free, and so forth. Here I found again that _Feast of Trimalchion_ I stumbled through dully in school days, and later read with zest, while glorious visions of Rome brought from Latin poets, likewise from etchings of Piranesi, crowded my memory as I read.