oxes, while the
insignificant-looking and meanly dressed Beethoven used to stand
unnoticed in a corner. Here is a description of his appearance given
by a Frau von Bernhard: "When he visited us, he generally put his head
in at the door before entering, to see if there were any one present
he did not like. He was short and insignificant-looking, with a red
face covered with pock-marks. His hair was quite dark. His dress was
very common, quite a contrast to the elegant attire customary in those
days, especially in our circles.... He was very proud, and I have
known him refuse to play, even when Countess Thun, the mother of
Princess Lichnowski, had fallen on her knees before him as he lay on
the sofa to beg him to. The Countess was a very eccentric person....
At the Lichnowskis' I saw Haydn and Salieri, who were then very
famous, while Beethoven excited no interest."

It was in the year 1800 that Beethoven at last was compelled to
acknowledge to himself the terrible calamity of almost total deafness
that had befallen him. He writes to his friend Wegeler, "If I had not
read somewhere that man must not of his own free will depart this
life, I should long ere this have been no more and that through my own
act.... What is to be the result of this the good God alone knows. I
beg of you not to mention my state to any one, not even to Lorchen
[Wegeler's wife]. But," he continues, "I live only in my music, and no
sooner is one thing completed than another is begun. In fact, as at
present, I am often engaged on three or four compositions at one
time."

[Illustration: An Anecdote about Beethoven.]

But at first all was not gloom; for Beethoven was in love--not the
love of fleeting fancy that, like other poets, he may have experienced
before, but deeply, tragically, in love; and it seems that, for a time
at least, this love was returned. The lady was the Countess Julia
Guicciardi; but his dream did not last long, for in the year 1801 she
married a Count Gallenberg. Hardly anything is known of this love
affair of Beethoven's. A few letters full of passionate tenderness,
and with a certain very pathetic simple trustfulness in her love
running through them all--on which her marriage shortly afterward is a
strange comment; the "Moonlight Sonata," vibrating, as it is
throughout, with a lover's supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are
the only records of that one blissful epoch in the poor composer's
life; but how much it affected his