Malwida von Meysenbug, Memories of an Idealist, tr. Monte B. Gardiner (1999; A thesis submitted to the faculty of Brigham Young University), ch. 15, The Return, p. 60:
All around us, high, snow-covered Alp summits arose . . . A piercing, ice-cold air forced us to cover ourselves in cloaks and move quickly. The boys ran and jumped over large stones and clumps of ice; the tutor remained aloof, he had been angry with me for a long time, since I had moved about in circles from which he had been excluded because of his ignorance of the French language. So I walked alone, lost in observations and memories. I thought about everything I had just left with nostalgia. I compared the magical evenings of a week ago with this journey through the icy wasteland of barren nature. I glanced up to the white summits which shone brilliantly in the rays of a cold sun, and it seemed to me that I was seeing my own destiny sketched upon the ice with diamond-like writing. «The hours of youth, of beauty, of magic are only given to those who live for the ideal in order to bolster their courage and refresh their heart. But for the most part, their life is a struggle without end, a path that leads through desolate deserts, like the road you are traveling. Do you want to accept the challenge and not shun the sacrifice that it requires? Are you willing to repeatedly crucify your heart, which contains the eternally burning thirst for beauty?»
In that moment, as I imagined reading this writing in an unmistakable hand, the boys hurried over and brought me a bouquet of violets which they had picked from the sparse green growing amidst the ice. Then they leapt away to look for more. The sight of these flowers which characterized my thoughts so perfectly moved me deeply, and I involuntarily knelt on the rocks and cried: «Yes, I accept the challenge; I will walk the solitary path without wavering which those who seek the truth pursue, and I will be thankful for the few flowers which I find along the way.»
Meysenbug was a dear friend of Nietzsche's. He lived with her and Paul Rée in Sorrento, where they all read Voltaire together (alongside some others, like Mainländer and Diderot), and where Nietzsche started his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Meysenbug's Memoiren einer Idealistin was of three volumes, published anonymously. Nietzsche acquired the book in early 1876 and perused it thoroughly, and probably reread it in later years of his life (until 1888), and recommended it to his friends, like Rohde and Gersdorff. The above translation is the only available one in English, as far as I am concerned, and it claimes that it is a full translation. I came across Meysenbug only once before that I didn't even remember her; it was in William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience [1917], p. 395, under an excerpt taken from Amiel's Journal Intime. The excerpt of Meysenbug's reads thus:
I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting: ‘Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.’
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