The young Breunings were all intellectual, and in the pursuit of their studies they were encouraged and assisted by their uncle, the canon. Christoph wrote very good verses, and Stephan also tried his hand at some, which were not bad. The striving of these young people would naturally lead our sensitive musician to reflect on his own defective education, and to endeavour so to rectify it as to render himself worthy of their friendship. Beethoven's love of the ancient classical writers may be traced to this period, when Christoph and Stephan were studying them in the original with their uncle, though it is not probable that he ever learned Greek. His knowledge of Homer was gained through Voss's translation, and his well-worn copy of the "Odyssey" testifies to the earnest study it had received from him. French and Italian he seems to have been acquainted with so far as he deemed it necessary; but his principal literary studies were confined to Lessing, Bürger, Wieland, and Klopstock. The last especially was his favourite, and his constant companion in the solitary rambles among the mountains which he was fond of indulging in. There, alone with the nature he venerated, the sonorous lines and rolling periods of the German Milton sank deeply into his mind, to be reproduced years after in immortal harmonies. At a later period Klopstock was replaced in Beethoven's esteem by Goethe, of whose poems he was wont to say that they "exercised a great sway over him, not only by their meaning, but by their rhythm also. Their language urged him on to composition." But of all the blissful influences which tended to make this time the happiest in his life, not one was so powerful as that of Madame von Breuning herself. To her everlasting honour be it said that she was the first of the very few individuals who ever thoroughly understood the morbid and apparently contradictory character of Beethoven; and greatly is it to the credit of the latter that he merited the love of such a woman. Not his abilities alone gave him a place in her heart; it was his true, noble, generous nature that won for him a continuance of the favours first bestowed upon the artist. Madame v. Breuning thoroughly appreciated Beethoven; he felt that she did. Hence the tacit confidence that existed between them--he coming to her as to a mother, and she advising him as she would have done one of her own sons. Beethoven used to say of her that she understood how to "keep the insects from the blossoms."