Most honored sir,
It has long been my intention to express unreservedly the debt of gratitude I owe you. As a matter of fact, the highest and most inspiring moments of my life are closely associated with your name, and I know of only one other man, and that man your twin brother of intellect, Arthur Schopenhauer, whom I regard with the same veneration—yea, even more, as religione quadam.
I take especial pleasure in making this confession to you on this auspicious day, and even do so with a feeling of pride. For if it be the fate of genius to belong to the "select few"—for the time being at least—these "few" have every reason to feel highly honored by virtue of the fact that it has been vouchsafed them to see the light and bask in its warmth, while the larger public stands shivering in the cold outside. Moreover, this ability to take delight in genius is not a thing that falls lightly in the lap of these few, but is rather to be regarded as the result of a valiant fight against powerful prejudice and antagonism. Having fought this fight successfully, they come to feel that right of conquest has given them quite an especial claim upon this particular genius.
I make bold to count myself among these "select few," since realizing how incapable the world at large is of comprehending your personality, or of feeling the deeply ethical current by which your life, your writings, and your music are permeated—in short, of sensing an atmosphere of that serious and more spiritual outlook upon life of which we poor Germans have been robbed overnight, as it were, by every conceivable sort of political misery, philosophical nonsense, and aggressive Judaism.
It is to you and Schopenhauer that I owe my ability of holding fast to the vital seriousness of the Germanic race and to the deepened contemplation of our enigmatical and perplexing existence.
How many purely scientific problems have been elucidated for me by dwelling on your own singularly lonely and unique personality! All this I should have liked to have said to you face to face, just as I should have preferred not to have been obliged to write all that I have just written.
How gladly would I have been with you in your lake and mountain solitude had not the chains of my professional duties bound me to my Basle dog-kennel.
In closing I beg you to remember me to Baroness von Bülow, and remain your most faithful and reverential disciple and admirer, Dr. Fr. Nietzsche, Professor in Basle.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 1