It is not very generally recognised that Beethoven was not only a great musician, but a great leader and teacher. He freed the human spirit from innumerable petty bonds and conventions, he recorded the profoundest experiences of life, and gave form and utterance to emotions hardly guessed--certainly not definitely expressed--before his time. Personally I feel I owe much more to Beethoven in these respects than I do to Shakespeare: and though this, of course, may be a purely personal or accidental matter, yet I mention it in order to show that the music of such a man has, after all, the closest bearing on actual life. M. Romain Rolland in his excellent little study has brought this prophetic and inspiring quality of Beethoven's life and music out very strongly. He has traced the tragedy of Beethoven's life and experience, and its culmination in a kind of liberation of his spirit from the bonds of mortality; he has shown how this connects up with the composer's strong sentiment of democracy and sympathy with the suffering masses; and how it leads to the utterance of that strange sense of joy which penetrates and suffuses his later work. In all these respects M. Rolland regards Beethoven as one of the greatest benefactors of humanity. On the other hand our author builds in the picture of Beethoven's life and character with a great number of small touches derived from all sorts of writers and biographers--and so succeeds in giving a life-like impression of his personality. EDWARD CARPENTER. * * * * * As bearing on the subject of M. Romain Rolland's book, Mr. Carpenter has kindly given permission to insert the following few extracts from his own book, "Angels' Wings."