It was in the year 1800 that Beethoven at last was compelled to acknowledge to himself the terrible calamity of almost total deafness that had befallen him. He writes to his friend Wegeler, "If I had not read somewhere that man must not of his own free will depart this life, I should long ere this have been no more and that through my own act.... What is to be the result of this the good God alone knows. I beg of you not to mention my state to any one, not even to Lorchen [Wegeler's wife]. But," he continues, "I live only in my music, and no sooner is one thing completed than another is begun. In fact, as at present, I am often engaged on three or four compositions at one time." [Illustration: An Anecdote about Beethoven.] But at first all was not gloom; for Beethoven was in love--not the love of fleeting fancy that, like other poets, he may have experienced before, but deeply, tragically, in love; and it seems that, for a time at least, this love was returned. The lady was the Countess Julia Guicciardi; but his dream did not last long, for in the year 1801 she married a Count Gallenberg. Hardly anything is known of this love affair of Beethoven's. A few letters full of passionate tenderness, and with a certain very pathetic simple trustfulness in her love running through them all--on which her marriage shortly afterward is a strange comment; the "Moonlight Sonata," vibrating, as it is throughout, with a lover's supremest ecstasy of devotion, these are the only records of that one blissful epoch in the poor composer's life; but how much it affected his after life, how it mingled in the dreams from which his loveliest creations of later years arose, it is impossible now to say. In a letter to Wegeler, dated November 16, 1801, he says, "You can hardly realize what a miserable, desolate life mine has been for the last two years; my defective hearing everywhere pursuing me like a spectre, making me fly from every one, and appear a misanthrope; and yet no one in reality is less so! This change [to a happier life] has been brought about by a lovely and fascinating girl who loves me and whom I love. After the lapse of two years I have again enjoyed some blissful moments, and now for the first time I feel that marriage can bestow happiness; but alas! she is not in the same rank of life as myself.... You shall see me as happy as I am destined to be here below, but not unhappy. No, that I could not bear. I will grasp Fate by the throat; it shall not utterly crush me. Oh, it is so glorious to live one's life a thousand times!" No misanthropy this, surely; he could not always speak the speech of common men, or care for the tawdry bravery of titles or fine clothes in which they strutted, but what a heart there was in the man, what a wondrous insight into all the beauty of the world, visible and invisible, around him! The most glorious lovesong ever composed, "Adelaide," was written by him; but Julia Guicciardi preferred a Count Gallenberg,