re, especially with the
poets, and here first had opportunity to gain the cultivation necessary
for social life."

He was soon treated by the Von Breunings as a son and brother, passing
not only most of his days, but many of his nights, at their house, and
sometimes spending his vacations with them at their country-seat in
Kerpen,--a small town on the great road from Cologne to Aix la Chapelle.
With them he felt free and unrestrained, and everything tended at the
same time to his happiness and his intellectual development. Nor was
music neglected. The members of the family were all musical, and
Stephen, the eldest son, sometimes played in the Electoral Orchestra.

No person possessed so strong an influence upon the oft-times stubborn
and wilful boy as the Frau von Breuning. She best knew how to bring him
back to the performance of his duty, when neglectful of his pupils; and
when she, with gentle force, had made him cross the square to the house
of the Austrian ambassador, Count Westfall, to give the promised lesson,
and saw him, after hesitating for a time at the door, suddenly fly
back, unable to overcome his dislike to lesson-giving, she would bear
patiently with him, merely shrugging her shoulders and remarking,
"To-day he has his _raptus_ again!" The poverty at home and his love for
his mother alone enabled him ever to master this aversion.

To the Breunings, then, we are indebted for that love of Plutarch,
Homer, Shakspeare, Goethe, and whatever gives us noble pictures of that
greatness of character which we term "heroic," that enabled the future
composer to stir up within us all the finest and noblest emotions,
as with the wand of a magician. The boy had an inborn love of the
beautiful, the tender, the majestic, the sublime, in nature, in art, and
in literature,--together with a strong sense of the humorous and even
comic. With the Breunings all these qualities were cultivated and in
the right direction. To them the musical world owes a vast debt of
gratitude.

Beethoven was no exception to the rule, that only a great man can be a
great artist. True, in his later years his correspondence shows at
times an ignorance of the rules of grammar and orthography; but it also
proves, what may be determined from a thousand other indications, that
he was a deep thinker, and that he had a mind of no small degree of
cultivation, as it certainly was one of great intellectual power. Had he
devoted his life to any other prof