They had promised each other that they would spend their first holiday weeks together. At the beginning of August, being both free, they left Leipsic and sought isolation in walks in a tramp on the frontiers of Bohemia. It is a region of wooded heights, which recalls, with less grandeur, the Vosges. Nietzsche and Rohde led the life of wandering philosophers. Their luggage was light, they had no books, they walked from inn to inn, and, throughout the days unspoilt by a care, they talked about Schopenhauer, about Beethoven, about Germany, about Greece. They judged and condemned, with youthful promptitude; they were never weary of defaming their science. "Oh childishness of erudition!" they said. "It was a poet, it was Goethe, who discovered the genius of Greece. He it was who held it up to the Germans, absorbed always on the confines of a dream, as an example of rich and clear beauty, a model of perfect form. The professors followed him. They have explained the ancient world, and, under their myopic eyes, that wonderful work of art has become the object of a science. What is there that they have not studied? In Tacitus, the ablative case, the evolution of the gerund in the Latin authors of Africa; they have analysed to the last detail the language of the _Iliad,_ determined in what respect it is connected with this other and that other Aryan language. What does it all signify? The beauty of the _Iliad_ is unique; it was felt by Goethe, and they ignore it. We shall stop this game; that will be our task. We shall go back to the tradition of Goethe; we shall not dissect the Greek genius, we shall revitalise it, and teach men to feel it. For long enough the scholars have carried out their minute enquiries. It is time to make an end. The work of our generation shall be definitive; our generation shall enter into possession of the grand legacy transmitted by the past. And science, too, must serve progress." After a month of conversation, the young men left the forest and went to Meiningen, a little town in which the musicians of the Pessimist school were giving a series of concerts. A letter of Friedrich Nietzsche's has preserved a chronicle of the performance. "The Abbé Liszt presided," he wrote. "They played a symphonic poem by Hans von Bülow, _Nirvana,_ an explanation of which was given on the programme in maxims from Schopenhauer. But the music was awful. Liszt, on the contrary, succeeded remarkably in finding the character of the Indian _Nirvana_ in some of his religious compositions; for example, in his _Beatitudes."_ Nietzsche and Rohde separated on the morrow of these festivals, and returned to their families. * * * * *