also found a safe guide and good friend in Christian Gottlob Neefe, his music master, whose high moral character had no less influence on the young musician than did his broad and his intelligent, artistic views. Sad as was the childhood of Beethoven, he always treasured a tender and melancholy memory of the places where it was spent. Though compelled to leave Bonn, and destined to spend nearly the whole of his life in the frivolous city of Vienna with its dull environs, he never forgot the beautiful Rhine valley and the majestic river. "_Unser Vater Rhine_" (our father Rhine) as he called it, was to him almost human in its sympathy, being like some gigantic soul whose deep thoughts are beyond all human reckoning. No part is more beautiful, more powerful, more calm, than that part where the river caresses the shady and flowered slopes of the old University city of Bonn. There Beethoven spent the first twenty years of his life. There the dreams of his waking heart were born--in the fields, which slope languishingly down to the water side, with their mist-capped poplars, their bushes and their willows and the fruit trees whose roots are steeped in the rapid silent stream. And all along lying gently on the banks, strangely soft, are towns, churches, and even cemeteries, whilst away on the horizon the blue tints of the Seven Mountains show in wild jagged edges against the sky, forming a striking background to the graceful, slender, dream-like silhouettes of old ruined castles. His heart remained ever faithful to the beautiful, natural surroundings of his childhood, and until his very last moment he dreamt of seeing these scenes once again. "My native land, the beautiful country where I first saw the light of day; it is always as clear and as beautiful in my eyes as when I left it."[9] He never saw it again. * * * * * In November, 1792, Beethoven removed to Vienna, the musical metropolis of Germany.[10] The Revolution had broken out. It threatened to spread over the whole of Europe. Beethoven left Bonn just at the moment when the war reached it. On his way to Vienna he passed the Hessian armies marching to France. In 1796 and 1797 he set the war poems of Friedberg to music: a Song of Farewell, and a patriotic chorus; _Ein grosses deutsches Volk sind wir_ (A great German people are we). But it was in vain that he sang of the enemies of the Revolution; the Revolution overcame the world--and Beethoven with it. From 1798, in spite of the strained relations between Austria and France, Beethoven became closely connected with the French, with the Embassy and General Bernadotte, who had just arrived in Vienna. In this intercourse strong republican sympathies showed themselves in Beethoven, and these feelings became stronger and stronger with time.