Suffering so extreme as Beethoven’s had its inevitable effect, too, on the whole general tone and quality of his artistic utterance. He learned the lessons of sorrow as few men have ever learned them; temporal misfortune taught him to impersonalize his ideals, to turn to the eternal sources of hope in his inmost spirit, and to interpret the joys and sorrows not of his separate self merely, but of all humanity; but at the same time that his spirit was thus chastened, purified, and expanded, it was shorn of its primitive vigor, its pristine elasticity, energy, and animation. If the music of his prime is the music of pagan idealism, that of his later years is the music of stoicism--the stern and noble stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, touched with the tenderness and spiritual joy of Christ. It breathes a high serenity, a transfigured human happiness, attainable only to a great soul after much suffering. If any mortal artist could be justified in such a boast, Beethoven was justified when he wrote: “I do not fear for my works. No evil can befall them; and whosoever shall understand them, he shall be freed from all the misery that burdens mankind.” * * * * * As we take a last backward glance over the life of Beethoven, and over that larger life of the art of music in the classical period, of which it was the final stage, we cannot but be profoundly impressed by the unity and continuity of the whole evolution. From its first slight and tentative beginnings in the experiments of the Florentine reformers, secular music, the art of expressing through the medium of tones, the full, free, and harmonious emotional life of modern idealism gradually acquired, through the labors of the seventeenth-century composers, definiteness of aim and technical resources. Then, in the work of Haydn and Mozart, it reached the stage of maturity, of self-consciousness; it became flexible, various, many-sided, adequate to the demands made upon it; it emerged from childhood, and took its honored place in the circle of independent and recognized arts. Finally, it was brought by Beethoven to its ripe perfection, its full flowering. It was made to say all that, within its native limitations, it was capable of saying. It reached the fullness of life beyond which it could live only by breaking itself up into new types, as the old plant scatters forth seeds. And even these new types were dimly divined, and suggested to his successors, by Beethoven. Was it not his effort to express, in absolute music, the most various shades of personal, highly specialized feeling, vigorous, sentimental, mystical, or elfishly wayward, that inspired the romantic composers, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and their fellows, to pursue even further the same quest? Was it not his feeling out toward novel dramatic effects in the combined chorus and orchestra, in the Ninth Symphony, that showed Wagner the path he must take? Was it