thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
was no Fraeulein Androcles to take it away.

Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
mute image of her that my fancy paints."

This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
his life-long griefs--lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.

And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
said, _inter lacrimas et luctum_.

The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.

To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
of his "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27, No. 2)--"_alla damigella contessa
Giulietta Guicciardi."_ It was in 1802, w