after life, how it mingled in the
dreams from which his loveliest creations of later years arose, it is
impossible now to say. In a letter to Wegeler, dated November 16,
1801, he says, "You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life
mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere
pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a
misanthrope; and yet no one in reality is less so! This change [to a
happier life] has been brought about by a lovely and fascinating
girl who loves me and whom I love. After the lapse of two years I
have again enjoyed some blissful moments, and now for the first time I
feel that marriage can bestow happiness; but alas! she is not in the
same rank of life as myself.... You shall see me as happy as I am
destined to be here below, but not unhappy. No, that I could not bear.
I will grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not utterly crush me. Oh, it
is so glorious to live one's life a thousand times!" No misanthropy
this, surely; he could not always speak the speech of common men, or
care for the tawdry bravery of titles or fine clothes in which they
strutted, but what a heart there was in the man, what a wondrous
insight into all the beauty of the world, visible and invisible,
around him! The most glorious lovesong ever composed, "Adelaide," was
written by him; but Julia Guicciardi preferred a Count Gallenberg,
keeper of the royal archives in Vienna, and Beethoven, to the end of
his days, went on his way alone.

It was at this time that he composed his oratorio, "The Mount of
Olives," which can hardly be reckoned among his finest works; and his
one opera--but such an opera--"Fidelio." The greater part of these
works was composed during his stay, in the summer months, at
Hetzendorf, a pretty, secluded little village near Schoenbrunn. He
spent his days wandering alone through the quiet, shady alleys of the
imperial park there, and his favorite seat was between two boughs of a
venerable oak, at a height of about two feet from the ground. For some
time he had apartments at a residence of Baron Pronay's, near this
village; but he suddenly left, "because the baron would persist in
making him profound bows every time that he met him." Like a true
poet, he delighted in the country. "No man on earth," he writes,
"loves the country more. Woods, trees, and rock give the response
which man requires. Every tree seems to say, 'Holy, holy.'"

In 1804 the magnificen