Nor is it true that Beethoven is incapable of this elevated soaring in the higher realms of the merely beautiful in song. There is generally an undercurrent of deeper pathos in all his sustained slow movements, but in the earlier symphonies, especially in the second, there is a long slow movement of heavenly depth and quality. Indeed, without pausing to individualize we may say once for all that the slow movements of Beethoven are nearly as sweet and as forgetful, as rapturous, as those of Mozart. Even when he takes the lower key of the minor, with its implication of suffering and pain, there is still a sweetness, which once heard can never be forgotten. Think of the lovely _allegretto_ of the seventh symphony, with its persistent motive of a quarter and two-eighths. Even in an arrangement for the pianoforte this is still impressive; upon the organ yet more so; but how much more so when given by the orchestra, with the lovely changing colors of Beethoven's instrumentation! The progress from Haydn's slow movement to that of Beethoven is in the direction of depth, self-forgetfulness, and elevated reverie, having in it a quality distinctly church-like, devotional, worshipful and reposeful in the heavenly sense. The finest example of this is in the slow movement of the ninth symphony of Beethoven, where the composer has one of those lofty moods, which even in his younger times Mrs. Von Breuning used to call his "_raptus_"--rapture of song. In a technical point of view the handling of the themes becomes more masterly in Beethoven than even in Mozart--mainly perhaps because the symphonies of Beethoven represent a more mature point in his mental and artistic career than do those of Mozart. The third symphony of Beethoven was written in 1803, the composer being thirty-three years old; the fourth waited until he was thirty-five or six. Mozart died at the age of thirty-five, and whatever we have from his lofty pen came to the young Mozart, not yet having reached middle life. Observe also the rapidity with which these great works followed one another from the pen of Beethoven, when once he had found his voice. The fifth symphony was written in 1808. In the same year he wrote also the sixth; four years later, in 1812, the next two symphonies, the seventh and eight. Then a long pause, filled up with other works, and at length when the composer was fifty-three years of age, in 1823, the mighty ninth. If Mozart's life had been spared to enter into the more comfortable and dignified openings which his death prevented, what might we not have had from him!