notes as there should be.” But a habit of intercourse with the minds of men gives an instinctive tact as to meeting them, and Michel Angelo, about to build St. Peter’s, takes into consideration, not only his own idea of a cathedral, but means, time, space, and prospects.
But the misfortune, which fettered the outward energies, deepened the thought of Beethoven. He travelled inward, downward, till downward was shown to be the same as upward, for the centre was passed.
Like all princes, he made many ingrates, and his powerful lion nature, was that most capable of suffering from the amazement of witnessing baseness. But the love, the pride, the faith, which survive such pangs are those which make our stair to heaven. Beethoven was not only a poet, but a victorious poet, for having drunk to its dregs the cup of bitterness, the fount of inward nobleness remained undefiled. Unbeloved, he could love; deceived in other men, he yet knew himself too well to despise human nature; dying from ingratitude, he could still be grateful.
Schindler thinks his genius would have been far more productive, if he had had a tolerably happy home, if instead of the cold discomfort that surrounded him, he had been blessed, like Mozart, with a gentle wife, who would have made him a sanctuary in her unwearied love. It is, indeed, inexpressibly affecting to find the “vehement nature,” even in his thirty-first year, writing thus; “At my age one sighs for an equality, a harmony of outward existence,” and to know that he never attained it. But the lofty ideal of the happiness which his life could not attain, shone forth not the less powerfully from his genius. The love of his choice was not “firm as the fortress of heaven,” but his heart remained the gate to that fortress. During all his latter years, he never complained, nor did Schindler ever hear him advert to past sorrows, or the lost objects of affection. Perhaps we are best con-
