What form did the poetical exposition of the Eternal Return then take in his soul? We do not know. Nietzsche did not care to talk about his work; he liked to complete it before making announcements. However, he wished that his friends should know the new movement in which his thought was engaged. He addressed to Fräulein von Meysenbug a letter in which Wagner was treated without deference, then he added a mysterious enough promise: "If I am not illusioned as to my future, it is by my work that what is best in the work of Wagner will be continued--and here, perhaps, is the comical side to the adventure." * * * * * At the beginning of spring Friedrich Nietzsche, following out a caprice, made a bargain with the captain of an Italian sailing vessel bound for Messina and crossed the Mediterranean. The passage was a terrible one, and he was sick to death. But his stay was at first happy: he wrote verses, a pleasure which he had not known for several years. They are impromptus and epigrams, perhaps inspired by those Goethean sallies which Peter Gast had put to music. Nietzsche then sought for a corner of nature and of humanity favourable to the production of his great work: Sicily, "Curb of the world where Happiness has her habitation," as old Homer teaches, struck him as an ideal refuge, and, suddenly forgetting that he could not bear the heat, he decided to stay in Messina for the whole summer. Some days of sirocco, towards the end of April, prostrated him, and he prepared for departure. It was in these circumstances that he received a message from Fräulein von Meysenbug, who urged him very keenly to stop at Rome. Rome was a natural stage on his journey, and he accepted. Why was Fräulein von Meysenbug thus insistent? We know. This excellent woman had never been resigned to the unhappiness of the friend whose destiny she had vainly sought to sweeten. She knew the delicacy, the tenderness of his heart, and often wished to find him a companion; had he not written to her, "I tell you in confidence, what I need is a good woman"? In the spring of this year she thought that she had found her.[2] This accounted for her letter. It was Fräulein von Meysenbug's habit to do good, and her taste; but perhaps she sometimes forgot that goodness is a difficult art in which the results of defeat are cruel.