Sixthly:  I have a deep resentment in my soul that it is not thee with whom I live under the same roof and with whom I breathe the same air.  I am afraid to be near strangers.  In church I look for a seat on the beggars’ bench, because they are the most neutral; the finer the people, the stronger my aversion.  To be touched makes me angry, ill, and unhappy, and so I cannot stand it long in society at dances.  I am fond of dancing, could I but dance alone in the open where the breath of strangers would not touch me.  What influence would it have on the soul if one could always live near one’s friend?—­all the more painful the struggle against that which must remain forever estranged, spiritually as well as physically.

Seventhly:  When I have to listen to any one reading aloud in company, I sit in a corner and secretly hold my ears shut or, at the first word that comes along, completely lose myself in thoughts.  Then, when some one does not understand, I awaken out of another world and presume to supply the explanation, and what the rest consider madness is all reasonable enough to me and consistent with an inner knowledge that I cannot impart.  Above all, I cannot bear to hear anything read from thy works, nor can I bear to read them aloud; I must be alone with me and thee.

Vienna, May 28, 1810.

It is Beethoven of whom I want to speak now, and in whom I have forgotten the world and thee.  I may not be qualified to judge, but I am not mistaken when I say (what perhaps no one now realizes or believes) that he is far in advance of the culture of all mankind, and I wonder whether we can ever catch up with him!  I doubt it.  I only hope that he may live until the mighty and sublime enigma that lies in his soul may have reached its highest and ripest perfection.  May he reach his highest ideal, for then he will surely leave in our hands the key to a divine knowledge which will bring us one step nearer true bliss!

To thee I may confess that I believe in a divine magic which is the element of spiritual nature, and this magic Beethoven employs in his music.  All he can teach thee about it is pure magic; every combination of sounds is a phase of a higher existence, and for this reason Beethoven feels that he is the founder of a new sensuous basis in the spiritual life.  Thou wilt probably be able to feel intuitively what I am trying to say, and that it is true.  Who could replace this spirit?  From whom could we expect anything equivalent to it?  All human activity passes to and fro before him like clockwork; he alone creates freely from his inmost self the undreamed of, the untreated.  What would intercourse with the outside world profit this man, who is at his sacred work before sunrise and scarcely looks about him before sunset, who forgets bodily nourishment, and who is borne in his flight by the stream of inspiration past the shores of superficial, everyday life.  He himself said to me, “Whenever I open my eyes I cannot