sive grandeur of his countenance. The impetus of his superb
imagination imparted an inconceivable dignity to every lineament, to his
capacious forehead, to his broad and distended nostrils, to the fierce
protrusion of his under-lip, to the mobile and generous expression of
his mouth, to the tawny yellow of his complexion, to the brown depths of
his noble and dilated eyes. There was something in unison with the
glorious sounds that reverberated through the chamber, even in the
enormous contour of his head and the gray disorder of his hair. He
seemed to exult in the torrent of melody as it gushed from the piano and
streamed out upon the dusk of the evening. While Cagliostro was
listening in an ecstasy of admiration, he was startled by a sudden
clangour among the bass-notes--the music seemed to be jumbled into
confusion, and the ear was stunned by a painful and intolerable
dissonance. On looking more intently, he perceived that the composer had
let one hand fall abstractedly upon the key-board, while the other
executed, by itself, a passage of extraordinary difficulty and
involution. Then, for the first time, the thought struck him that the
musician was deaf.[17] Alas! the supposition was too true: Beethoven was
cursed with the loss of his most precious faculty. Those who appreciate
the full splendour of his gigantic genius, those who conceive, with a
distinguished composer now living, that "Beethoven began where Haydn and
Mozart left off;" those who coincide with an eminent critic, in saying
that "the discords of Beethoven are better than the harmonies of all
other musicians;" those, in fine, who worship his memory with the
devotion inspired by his compositions, can sympathise in that terrible
deprivation of the powers of hearing, by which his art was rendered a
blank, and the latter years of his life were imbittered. They will
remember with gratitude the joys they have derived from the effusions of
his fruitful intellect; they will call to their recollection the joyous
chorus of the prisoners in _Fidelio_,--the sublime and adoring hymn of
the "Alleluia" in _The Mount of Olives_,--the matchless pomp of the
_Sinfonia Eroica_,--the passionate beauty of the sentiment of
_Adelaida_,--the aerial grace of his quartets and waltzes,--the
thrilling and almost awful pathos of the dirge written for six
trombones,--but, above all, they will recall to mind the noblest work
ever conceived and perfected by composer, one of the greatest
a