Pater Seraphice,
As it was impossible for me to participate in your birthday festivities last year, so again an unfavorable constellation prevents me from being with you. It is with a very bad grace that I take the pen so unwillingly forced into my hand, whereas I had hoped I might be able to make a Mayday pilgrimage to Tribschen.
Permit me to make my wishes today an expression of my most intimate personal feelings. Let others bring you congratulations in the name of divine art, in the name of their high hopes, in the name of their own individual wishes, but for me the most subjective of all wishes suffices. May you remain what you have been to me during the past year, my mystagogue in the esoteric doctrines of life and art. Even though the gray mists of philology should seem to separate us from time to time, my thoughts in reality shall ever be with you. If it be true, as you once wrote me (to my great pride!), that my life is directed by music, then you, and no other, are the director of that music, and you, yourself, have said that even a mediocre composition can create a good impression if well conducted. It is in this sense that I offer you the rarest of all wishes—may everything remain as it is, may the moment abide, for ah! it is so beautiful! All I ask of the coming year is that I may not prove unworthy of your priceless sympathy and your unfailing encouragement. Accept this wish as one of the myriads of other wishes with which you enter upon a new year of your life!
One of the "Blissful Youths."
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 11