My faithful friend,
You do me a great honor in regarding my opinion as of such vital importance to you in your decisions. I should be very well satisfied with myself, did I really think that I had exerted so great an influence upon you, as you carry out your resolves with such manliness, energy and persistence that I should like to be able to say that I had been of assistance to you. On the other hand, close contact with another friend seems to have only a confusing, in fact an injurious, effect. By this I do not mean solely our beloved Nietzsche, though I must confess that I cannot see how he would have been any happier had he never met me. Be that as it may, he came across my path in a field of life that could easily have become a quagmire had we not been able to fly away at the right moment. You, on the other hand, tread upon firm ground, bear fruit and introduce a stimulating current into our lives. Upon closer scrutiny, I believe that I am nearly always stuck in the mire, but I affect not to notice it, and this I attribute to my peculiar gifts. But best of all is my ability to make my dearest friends think that I am floating in the air, and this is your doing.
Therefore, good luck to your speedy and honorable discharge from Hohenheim. I can already picture you to myself on your carefully cultivated estates, where all of us will be assembled for a rural festival, myself attired in Don Quixote's arcadian costume.
Things are going fairly well with us; in fact, the children are too well and positively rampageous. The devil will soon be to pay here, and then you must not fail us!
Cordial greetings. "You are my well-beloved friend, in whom I take great delight." That sounds like the dear God speaking.
P.S. In six days we celebrate the sixth anniversary of Nietzsche's first visit to Tribschen.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 48