before his mental vision.  “What I have in my heart must come out when I write,” he stated to Czerny.  “I never thought of writing for fame and honor.”  Grandeur and simplicity are prominent traits in Beethoven’s character and these are exemplified in the Seventh Symphony.  Wagner calls it the Apotheosis of the dance.  “Der in Toenen idealisch verkoerperten Leibesbewegung,” [an ideal embodiment in tones of the movements of the human form].  This dance element is the characteristic trait of the symphony; the dance element on a colossal scale.  Listen to Wagner’s summary:  “But one Hungarian peasant dance in the final movement of his Symphony in A (the Seventh) he played for the whole of nature; so played that who could see her dancing to it in orbital gyrations must deem he saw a planet brought to birth before his very eyes.”  In these later symphonies we see the beginnings of the mysticism which so profoundly influenced Beethoven in his last years, reaching its consummation in the Mass in D, the last Quartets, and the Ninth Symphony.  From this period on, the picture to be drawn of him is of a man retiring more and more into himself as his growing experience with the world shows him his unfitness for it.  Only in his work did he have any real reason for living.  His every-day life became, for the most part, a phantasmagoria, wherein persons and events continually changed from grotesque to sublime, where nothing was stable or to be depended upon.  The only reality was in his art.  The consciousness that he was composing works that would go down the ages and delight many generations to come, was probably satisfaction enough to him to compensate him for anything he was called on to endure.  With the progress of his deafness his inability to cope with even the ordinary affairs of life increased, and this also had the effect of withdrawing him from the world.  The spiritual insight gained by years of introspection, of communion with the higher part of his nature enabled him to discover truths hidden to the consciousness of the ordinary man.  “That power of shaping the incomprehensible now grows with him; the joy in exercising this power becomes humor.  All the pain of existence is wrecked upon the immense pleasure derived from the play with it; the creator of worlds, Brahma, laughs to himself as he perceives the illusion with reference to himself; regained innocence plays jestingly with the thorns of expiated guilt; the emancipated conscience banters itself with the torments it has undergone.  And all his seeing and his fashioning is steeped in that marvellous gayety (Heiterkeit) which music first acquired through him.” (Wagner.)