On the artistic, as opposed to the analytical side, Nietzsche's most influential teacher, perhaps, was Goethe, the noblest intellectual figure of modern Germany, the common _stammvater_ of all the warring schools of today--in Nietzsche's own phrase, "not only a good and great man, but a culture itself." His writings are full of praises of his hero, whom he began to read as a boy of eight or ten years. His grandmother, Frau Erdmuthe Nietzsche, was a sister to Dr. Krause, professor of divinity at Weimar in Goethe's day, and she lived in the town while the poet held his court there, and undoubtedly came into contact with him. Her mother, Frau Pastor Krause, was probably the Muthgen of Goethe's diary. But despite all this, she thought that "Faust" and "Elective Affinities" were "not fit for little boys" and so it remained for Judge Pindar, the father of one of young Nietzsche's Naumburg playmates, to conduct the initiation.[12] Thirty years afterward, Nietzsche gratefully acknowledged his debt to Herr Pindar, and his vastly greater debt to Goethe--"a thorough-going realist in the midst of an unreal age.... He did not sever himself from life, but entered into it. Undaunted, he took as much as possible to himself.... What he sought was _totality_."[13] Nietzsche was also an extravagant admirer of Heinrich Heine, and tried to imitate that poet's "sweet and passionate music." "People will say some day," he declared, "that Heine and I were the greatest artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best any mere German[14] could do an incalculable distance behind us."[15] Another poet he greatly revered was Friedrich Hölderlin, a South German rhapsodist of the Goethe-Schiller period, who wrote odes in free rhythms and philosophical novels in gorgeous prose, and died the year before Nietzsche was born, after forty years of insanity. Karl Joel,[16] Dr. Mügge and other critics have sought to connect Nietzsche, through Hölderlin, with the romantic movement in Germany, but the truth is that both Nietzsche and Hölderlin, if they were romantics at all, were of the Greek school rather than the German. Certainly, nothing could be further from genuine German romanticism, with its sentimentality, its begging of questions and its booming patriotism, than the gospel of the superman. What Nietzsche undoubtedly got from the romantics was a feeling of ease in the German language, a disregard for the artificial bonds of the schools, a sense of hospitality to the gipsy phrase. In brief, they taught him how to write. But they certainly did not teach him what to write.