which had proved too difficult for the
wind-instruments in certain passages. Haydn examined it carefully, and
encouraged him to continue in the path of musical composition. Neefe
also hints to us that Haydn was greatly impressed by the skill of the
young man as a piano-forte virtuoso.

Happily, Beethoven was now, as we have seen, free from the burden of
supporting his young brothers, and needed but the means for his journey.

"In November of last year," writes Neefe, in 1793, "Ludwig van
Beethoven, second court organist, and indisputably one of the first of
living pianists, left Bonn for Vienna, to perfect himself in composition
under Haydn. Haydn intended to take him with him upon a second journey
to London, but nothing has come of it."

A few days or weeks, then, before completing his twenty-second year,
Beethoven entered Vienna a second time, to enjoy the example and
instructions of him who was now universally acknowledged the head of
the musical world; to measure his powers upon the piano-forte with the
greatest virtuosos then living; to start upon that career, in which,
by unwearied labor, indomitable perseverance, and never-tiring
effort,--alike under the smiles and the frowns of fortune, in sickness
and in health, and in spite of the saddest calamity which can befall
the true artist, he elevated himself to a position, which, by every
competent judge, is held to be the highest yet attained in perhaps the
grandest department of pure music.

Beethoven came to Vienna in the full vigor of youth just emerging into
manhood. The clouds which had settled over his childhood had all passed
away. All looked bright, joyous, and hopeful. Though, perhaps, wanting
in some of the graces and refinements of polite life, it is clear, from
his intimacy with the Breuning family, his consequent familiarity with
the best society at Bonn, the unchanging kindness of Count Waldstein,
the explicit testimony of Junker, that he was not, could not have been,
the young savage which some of his blind admirers have represented him.
The bare supposition is an insult to his memory. That his sense of
probity and honor was most acute, that he was far above any, the
slightest, meanness of thought or action, of a noble and magnanimous
order of mind, utterly destitute of any feeling of servility which
rendered it possible for him to cringe to the rich and the great, and
that he ever acted from a deep sense of moral obligation,--all this his
whole s