conventions. You cite Michaelangelo. I think no one has broken the conventional rules on Beauty like him. However, everything he has created is beautiful, because all his works have character. Raphael's art has never impressed me; his figures are prior to the fall of Adam and Eve. Also, southerners have aesthetics different from ours. They demand beauty of the form, while to our eyes what's ugly, in terms of form, becomes beautiful if we discover a principle of truth in it. It is useless to discuss these things with a pen in my hand; it would be necessary to see each other.

I still stand for what I've said about Brand. You wouldn't be able to find an offense against me in the arguments the work has provided to the "pietistas." It would be just as valid to accuse Luther of having introduced the burgeois spirit in this world. That didn't fit in his designs and it is not fair to make him responsible for it.

Anyway, thank you for your letter and thank you for having come to me, your friend. It brings me great joy to have found a personage.

I plan on leaving for Stockholm on tuesday. I will return to Dresde int he fall, where my family will be in my absence, and I will probably pass by Copenhagen, in order to speak with you, not only about literary things, in which we don't agree, but of many interesting things for humanity, in which we are on the same path. (1)

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(1) the great dramatic still ddn't know Jorge Brandes. The "stellar" friendship, Nietzche would say, was stretching, however, between the two geniuses, to favor the modern Northern culture. By the end of 1870 it was already intimate and something more than "the vital agreement for a bond of friendship," like Ibsen would ask in an introduction of the year letter. --Rafael Urbano