It came, however. At the end of November, 1826, he caught a chill which turned to pleurisy: he was taken ill in Vienna when returning from a journey undertaken in winter to arrange for the future of his nephew.[76] He was far from his friends. He told his nephew to go for a doctor. The wretch forgot his commission and only remembered two days after. The doctor came too late and treated Beethoven unskillfully. For three months his iron constitution fought against the illness. On January 3rd, 1827, he made his well-loved nephew his chief executor. He thought of his dear friends on the Rhine; he wrote again to Wegeler: "How I would like to talk with you! But I am too weak. I can do no more than embrace you in my heart, you and your Lorchen." Poverty would have made his last moments more gloomy, had it not been for the generosity of some English friends. He had become very gentle and very patient.[77] On his death-bed on February 17th, 1827, after three operations and awaiting a fourth,[78] he wrote with perfect calmness, "I am patient and I think that all misfortune brings some blessing with it." This boon was deliverance--"the end of the comedy," as he said when dying. We might say rather the end of the _tragedy_.... He died in the climax of a violent storm, a tempest of snow, heavily punctuated with terrible thunder claps. A strange hand closed his eyes,[79] March 26th, 1827. * * * * * Beloved Beethoven! So many others have praised his artistic grandeur. But he is easily the first of musicians. He is the most heroic soul in modern art. He is the grandest and the best friend of those who suffer and struggle. When we are saddened by worldly miseries, it is he who comes near to us, as he used to go and play to a mother in grief, and without uttering a word thus console her by the song of his own plaintive resignation. And when we are utterly exhausted in the eternal battle uselessly waged against mediocrity, vice and virtue, it is an unspeakable boon to find fresh strength in this great ocean-torrent of strong will and faith. An atmosphere of courage emanates from his personality, a love of battle,[80] the exultation of a conscious feeling of the _God within_. It seems that in his constant communion with nature[81] he had ended by assimilating its deep and mighty powers. Grillparzer, who admired Beethoven with a kind of awe, said of him, "He penetrated into regions where art melts away and unites with the wild and capricious elements." Schumann wrote similarly of his _Symphony in C minor_: "Every time it is performed it exercises an unvarying power on us, like natural phenomena which fill us with awe and amazement every time they occur." And Schindler, his confidential friend, says, "He possessed the spirit of nature." It is true, "Beethoven is a force of nature; and this battle of elemental power against the rest of nature is a spectacle of truly Homeric grandeur."