are head, and see the dazzling play of the
lightning. Or, failing the sublimer moods of Nature, it was his
delight to walk in the woods and fields, and take in at every pore the
influences which she so lavishly bestows on her favorites. His true life
was his ideal life in art. To him it was a mission and an inspiration,
the end and object of all things; for these had value only as they fed
the divine craving within.

"Nothing can be more sublime," he writes, "than to draw nearer to the
Godhead than other men, and to diffuse here on earth these Godlike rays
among mortals." Again: "What is all this compared to the grandest of all
Masters of Harmony--above, above?"

"All experience seemed an arch, wherethrough
Gleamed that untraveled world, whose margin fades
Forever and forever as we move."

The last four years of our composer's life were passed amid great
distress from poverty and feebleness. He could compose but little; and,
though his friends solaced his latter days with attention and kindness,
his sturdy independence would not accept more. It is a touching fact
that Beethoven voluntarily suffered want and privation in his last
years, that he might leave the more to his selfish and ungrateful
nephew. He died in 1827, in his fifty-seventh year, and is buried in
the Wahring Cemetery near Vienna. Let these extracts from a testamentary
paper addressed to his brothers in 1802, in expectation of death, speak
more eloquently of the hidden life of a heroic soul than any other words
could:

"O ye, who consider or declare me to be hostile, obstinate, or
misanthropic, what injustice ye do me! Ye know not the secret causes of
that which to you wears such an appearance. My heart and my mind were
from childhood prone to the tender feelings of affection. Nay, I was
always disposed even to perform great actions. But, only consider that,
for the last six years, I have been attacked by an incurable complaint,
aggravated by the unskillful treatment of medical men, disappointed from
year to year in the hope of relief, and at last obliged to submit to the
endurance of an evil the cure of which may last perhaps for years, if
it is practicable at all. Born with a lively, ardent disposition,
susceptible to to the diversions of society, I was forced at an early
age to renounce them, and to pass my life in seclusion. If I strove at
any time to set myself above all this, oh how cruelly was I driven back
by the doubly painful