sleet. As it passed away a flash of lightning
lighted up everything. This was followed by an awful clap of thunder.
Huttenbrenner had been sitting on the side of the bed sustaining
Beethoven's head--holding it up with his right arm His breathing was
already very much impeded, and he had been for hours dying. At this
startling, awful peal of thunder, the dying man suddenly raised his
head from Huttenbrenner's arm, stretched out his own right arm
majestically--like a general giving orders to an army. This was but for
an instant; the arm sunk back; he fell back. Beethoven was dead.

"Another talk with Huttenbrenner. It seems that Beethoven was at his
last gasp, one eye already closed. At the stroke of lightning and the
thunder peal he raised his arm with a doubled-up fist; the expression of
his eyes and face was that of one defying death,--a look of defiance and
power of resistance.

"He must have had his arm under the pillow. I must ask him.

"I did ask him; he had his arm around B.'s neck." H. E. K.]

311. "I am that which is. I am all that was, that is, and that shall be.
No mortal man has ever lifted the veil of me. He is solely of himself,
and to this Only One all things owe their existence."

(Beethoven's creed. He had found it in Champollion's "The Paintings
of Egypt," where it is set down as an inscription on a temple to the
goddess Neith. Beethoven had his copy framed and kept it constantly
before him on his writing desk. "The relic was a great treasure in his
eyes"--Schindler.)

312. "Wrapped in the shadows of eternal solitude, in the impenetrable
darkness of the thicket, impenetrable, immeasurable, unapproachable,
formlessly extended. Before spirit was breathed (into things) his
spirit was, and his only. As mortal eyes (to compare finite and infinite
things) look into a shining mirror."

(Copied, evidently, from an unidentified work, by Beethoven; though
possibly original with him.)

313. "It was not the fortuitous meeting of the chordal atoms that made
the world; if order and beauty are reflected in the constitution of the
universe, then there is a God."

(Diary, 1816.)

314. "He who is above,--O, He is, and without Him there is nothing."

(Diary.)

315. "Go to the devil with your 'gracious Sir!' There is only one who
can be called gracious, and that is God."

(About 1824 or 1825, to Rampel, a copyist, who, apparently, had been
a little too obsequiou