The only other art with which he had any acquaintance was poetry, and for this he shows a lifelong and steadily growing appreciation. In the home circle of his early friends, the Breunings, he first learned something of German and English literature. Shakespeare was familiar to him, and he had a great admiration for Ossian, just then very popular in Germany. Homer and Plutarch he knew, though only in translation. In 1809 we find him ordering complete sets of Goethe and Schiller, and in a letter to Bettina Brentano he says: ‘When you write to Goethe about me, select all words which will express to him my inmost reverence and admiration.’ At the time of his interest in his physician’s daughter, Therese Malfatti, he sends her as a gift Goethe’s _Wilhelm Meister_ and Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare, and speaks to her of reading Tacitus. Elsewhere he writes: ‘I have always tried from childhood onward to grasp the meaning of the better and the wise of every age. It is a disgrace for any artist who does not think it his duty at least to do that much.’ These instances of deliberate selection show the strong tendency of his mind toward the powerful, epic, and ‘grand’ style of literature, and an almost complete indifference toward the light and ephemeral. His own language, as shown in the letters, show many minor inaccuracies, but is, nevertheless, strongly characteristic, forceful, and natural, and often trenchant or sardonic. In his relation to his friends, happily his life shows many richer and more grateful experiences than with his own immediate family. Besides the Breunings, his first and perhaps most important friend was Count Waldstein, who recognized his genius and was undoubtedly of service to him in Bonn as well as in Vienna. In the album in which his friends inscribed their farewells upon his departure from Bonn Waldstein’s entry is this: ‘Dear Beethoven, you are travelling to Vienna in fulfillment of your long cherished wish. The genius of Mozart is still weeping and bewailing the death of her favorite. With the inexhaustible Haydn she found a refuge, but no occupation, and is now waiting to leave him and join herself to someone else. Labor assiduously and receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn. Your true friend, Waldstein. Bonn, October 29, 1792.’[53]