Monday, October 6:
R. gets up once and comes back after a while, saying he has found his Plutarch - he lost it a long time ago and now finds it at last in his room, acting as a support for his coverlet.
At lunch he speaks of the first movement of the F Major Quartet, the theme of which he describes as "inspired shuffling," "divine pomade." He says Beethoven was not yet completely free in it, as in the F Major Symphony, for example, which he calls the most divine of all. He quotes a lot of things about animals which he has read with great delight in Plutarch's essay on terrestrial and marine animals.
In the morning he talked appreciatively of Hildebrandt the landscape painter and, reminded of him by the similarity of names, says: "What is a literary person like Hillebrand compared with the painter who gives us such pictures of distant lands? How pitiful he is in comparison!" In the evening Herr Rubin plays the E-flat Major Quartet, to R.'s great delight; in the afternoon R. was shadowed by the "three little boys" and returned from his walk rather vexed over it.