what am I? and what is he whom they name Greatest? And yet there is the godlike in man.”
“Notwithstanding the many temptations to which he was exposed, he, like each other demigod, knew how to preserve his virtue without a stain. Thus his inner sense for virtue remained ever pure, nor could he suffer anything about him of dubious aspect on the moral side. In this respect he was conscious of no error, but made his pilgrimage through life in untouched maidenly purity. The serene muse, who had so highly gifted and elected him to her own service, gave in every wise to his faculties the upward direction, and protected him, even in artistical reference, against the slightest contact with vulgarity, which, in life as in art, was to him a torture.”—“Ah, had he but carried the same clearness into the business transactions of his life!”
So sighs the friend, who thinks his genius was much impeded by the transactions, in which his want of skill entangled him with sordid, contemptible persons.
Thus in unbroken purity and proud self-respect, amid princely bounties and free, manly relations, in the rapid and harmonious development of his vast powers, passed the first thirty years of his life. But towards the close of that period, crept upon him the cruel disorder, to him of all men the most cruel, which immured him a prisoner in the heart of his own kingdom, and beggared him for the rest of his life of the delights he never ceased to lavish on others.
After his fate was decided he never complained, but what lay in the secret soul is shown by the following paper.
“During the summer he lived at Heiligenstadt, by the advice of his physician, and in the autumn wrote the following testament:—
“For my brothers Carl and —— Beethoven.
“O ye men, who esteem or declare me unkind, morose, or misanthropic, what injustice you do me; you know not the secret causes of that which so seems. My heart and my mind were from childhood disposed to the tender feelings of good will. Even to perform great actions was I ever disposed. But think only that for six years this ill has been growing upon
