"Now," he writes to Erwin Rohde, who was living at Rome, "I, too, have my Italy, but I am able to visit it only on Saturdays and Sundays. My Italy is called Triebschen, and I already feel as if it were my home. Recently I have been there four times running, and into the bargain a letter travels the same road almost every week. My dear friend, what I see and hear and learn there I find it impossible to tell you. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Pindar and Æschylus are, believe me, still alive." Each of his returns was an occasion of melancholy. A feeling of solitude depressed him. He confided in Erwin Rohde, speaking at the same time of the hopes he had in his work. "Alas, dear friend," he said, "I have very few satisfactions, and solitary, always solitary, I must ruminate on them all within myself. Ah! I should not fear a good illness, if I could purchase at that price a night's conversation with you. Letters are so little use! ... Men are constantly in need of midwives, and almost all go to be delivered in taverns, in colleges where little thoughts and little projects are as plentiful as litters of kittens. But when we are full of our thought no one is there to aid us, to assist us at the difficult accouchment: sombre and melancholy, we deposit in some dark hole our birth of thought, still heavy and shapeless. The sun of friendship does not shine upon them." "I am becoming a virtuoso in the art of solitary walking," he says again; and he adds: "My friendship has something pathological about it." Nevertheless he is happy in the depths of his being; he says so himself one day, and warns his friend Rohde against his own letters: "Correspondence has this that is vexatious about it: one would like to give the best of oneself, whereas, in fact, one gives what is most ephemeral, the accord and not the eternal melody. Each time that I sit down to write to you, the saying of Hölderlin (the favourite author of my schooldays) comes back to my mind: 'Denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche _vom Besten!_' And, as well as I remember, what have you found in my last letters? Negations, contrarieties, singularities, solitudes. Nevertheless, Zeus and the divine sky of autumn know it, a powerful current carries me towards positive ideas, each day I enjoy exuberant hours which delight me with full perceptions, with real conceptions--in such instants of exalting impressions, I never miss sending you a long letter full of thoughts and of vows; and I fling it athwart the blue sky, trusting, for its carriage towards you, to the electricity which is between our souls." And we can get a glimpse of these positive ideas, these precious impressions, because we are in possession of all the notes and the blunders of the young man who was acquiring, at the price of constant effort, strength and mastery.