 There he developed a close relationship with Ernests Felsbergs, later art history professor and rector of the University of Latvia, as a teacher.Skalbe's first encounter with poetry, however, was not at school but during his four summers as a shepherd, where in his bed under the hay mattress he found a long mislaid book of poems by Pēteris Ceriņš, a lyric poet active in the 1860s and 70's.Skalbe wrote his first poem at 12, and tried his hand at his first fairy tale not long after.