the feebleness of the response he was given, and as he was striving just
then to give up the practice of taking hydrate of chloral--a drug he had
begun to take while ill with influenza,--the following spring, spent in
Rome, was a somewhat gloomy one for him. He writes about it as follows:--
"I spent a melancholy spring in Rome, where I only just managed to live,--
and this was no easy matter. This city, which is absolutely unsuited to
the poet-author of 'Zarathustra', and for the choice of which I was not
responsible, made me inordinately miserable. I tried to leave it. I
wanted to go to Aquila--the opposite of Rome in every respect, and actually
founded in a spirit of enmity towards that city (just as I also shall found
a city some day), as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the
Church--a person very closely related to me,--the great Hohenstaufen, the
Emperor Frederick II. But Fate lay behind it all: I had to return again
to Rome. In the end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza
Barberini, after I had exerted myself in vain to find an anti-Christian
quarter. I fear that on one occasion, to avoid bad smells as much as
possible, I actually inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale whether they
could not provide a quiet room for a philosopher. In a chamber high above
the Piazza just mentioned, from which one obtained a general view of Rome
and could hear the fountains plashing far below, the loneliest of all songs
was composed--'The Night-Song'. About this time I was obsessed by an
unspeakably sad melody, the refrain of which I recognised in the words,
'dead through immortality.'"

We remained somewhat too long in Rome that spring, and what with the effect
of the increasing heat and the discouraging circumstances already
described, my brother resolved not to write any more, or in any case, not
to proceed with "Zarathustra", although I offered to relieve him of all
trouble in connection with the proofs and the publisher. When, however, we
returned to Switzerland towards the end of June, and he found himself once