the procession defile past Goethe, who stood aside with his hat off, bowing profoundly. I afterward took him sharply to task for this.” In the sort of pride manifested by Beethoven on this occasion, there is an element of the hysterical; had his sense of humor been applied to himself as well as to his companion, he would have been “infinitely amused” to behold himself, with his hat pressed firmly on his head and his great-coat buttoned up, demanding for the aristocracy of genius that very servility which he despised when it was shown to the aristocracy of rank. It was Beethoven himself this time who, misled by an overweening pride, was hankering after the accident when he already possessed the essence. Examined by and large, however, Beethoven does not often disappoint us by failing to make that distinction between the nucleus of reality and its swathings and accompaniments, which lay at the foundation of his greatness. Nowhere were his instinct for the real and his contempt for the superfluous more active than in his thoughts on religion, the deepest and most serious topic on which a man can think. Sturdily ignoring, all his life, the trappings of ritual, and the narrow preciseness, as it seemed to him, of creeds and theologies, he as resolutely clung to the essence of religion, the belief in a universal, inclusive consciousness, and in the importance to it of right human effort. On the practical side his religion was eminently positive, efficient, sane; it prompted him to full development of his genius, without neglect of the responsibilities of ordinary life. Of the metaphysical side it is a sufficient description to say that there lay constantly on his desk, copied by his own hand, these sentences: “I am that which is.” “I am all that is, that was, and that shall be. No mortal man has lifted my veil.” “He is alone by Himself, and to Him alone do all things owe their being.”