Beethoven made a profound impression even as a youth on all who knew him.  Aside from the palpable marks of his power, there was an indomitable hauteur, a mysterious, self-wrapped air as of one constantly communing with the invisible, an unconscious assertion of mastery about him, which strongly impressed the imagination.

At the very outset of his career, when life promised all fair and bright things to him, two comrades linked themselves to him, and ever after that refused to give him up—­grim poverty and still grimmer disease.  About the same time that he lost a fixed salary through the death of his friend the Elector of Cologne, he began to grow deaf.  Early in 1800, walking one day in the woods with his devoted friend and pupil, Ferdinand Ries, he disclosed the sad secret to him that the whole joyous world of sound was being gradually closed up to him; the charm of the human voice, the notes of the woodland birds, the sweet babblings of Nature, jargon to others, but intelligible to genius, the full-born splendors of heard music—­all, all were fast receding from his grasp.

Beethoven was extraordinarily sensitive to the influences of Nature.  Before his disease became serious he writes:  “I wander about here with music-paper among the hills, and dales, and valleys, and scribble a good deal.  No man on earth can love the country as I do.”  But one of Nature’s most delightful modes of speech to man was soon to be utterly lost to him.  At last he became so deaf that the most stunning crash of thunder or the fortissimo of the full orchestra were to him as if they were not.  His bitter, heartrending cry of agony, when he became convinced that the misfortune was irremediable, is full of eloquent despair:  “As autumn leaves wither and fall, so are my hopes blighted.  Almost as I came, I depart.  Even the lofty courage, which so often animated me in the lovely days of summer, is gone forever.  O Providence! vouchsafe me one day of pure felicity!  How long have I been estranged from the glad echo of true joy!  When, O my God! when shall I feel it again in the temple of Nature and man?  Never!”

And the small-souled, mole-eyed gossips and critics called him hard, churlish, and cynical—­him, for whom the richest thing in Nature’s splendid dower had been obliterated, except a soul, which never in its deepest sufferings lost its noble faith in God and man, or allowed its indomitable courage to be one whit weakened.  That there were periods of utterly rayless despair and gloom we may guess; but not for long did Beethoven’s great nature cower before its evil genius.

III.

Within three years, from 1805 to 1808, Beethoven composed some of his greatest works:  the oratorio of “The Mount of Olives,” the opera of “Fidelio,” and the two noble symphonies, “Pastorale” and “Eroica,” besides a large number of concertos, sonatas, songs, and other occasional pieces.  However gloomy the externals of his life, his creative activities knew no cessation.