Beethoven was afflicted with "dense and incurable deafness" long before he had composed his greatest works. He said, "I was nigh taking my life with my own hands. But art held me back. I could not leave the world until I had revealed what lay within me." He occupied for a long time a room in a remote house on a hill, and was called the Solitary of the Mountain, where he heard, no doubt, more distinctly "the voices," than if he had been blest with the best of ears. "When he produced his mighty opera, Fidelio, it failed. In vain he again modeled and remodeled it. He went himself into the orchestra and attempted to lead it; and the pitiless public of Vienna laughed." His work so far surpassed the appreciation of many of his contemporaries as to be condemned as the vagaries of a madman. Haydn and Mozart, as was said, had perfected instrumental music in form; it remained for deaf Beethoven to touch it, so that it became a living soul. It does seem that God in his mystery has sometimes put out the eyes of poets and stopped the ears of musicians to admit them to glimpses of his own glories and whisper to them his own harmonies. Homer and Milton had inward poetic visions which light and sight alone never gave to man. Beethoven, unable from defective hearing to conduct an orchestra, produced celestial harmonies out of the silence of divine meditation. The philanthropy of John Howard was so prodigious that it rendered him incapable of ordinary enjoyments. His faculties were so absorbed by his great humanity that he was voted a bore by the liveliest and cleverest of his contemporaries. "But the mere men of taste," says John Foster, "ought to be silent respecting such a man as Howard; he is above their sphere of judgment. The invisible spirits, who fulfill their commissions of philanthropy among mortals, do not care about pictures, statues, and public buildings; and no more did he, when the time in which he must have inspected and admired them would have been taken from the work to which he had consecrated his life. The curiosity which he might feel was reduced to wait till the hour should arrive when its gratification should be presented by conscience, which kept a scrupulous charge of all his time, as the most sacred duty of that hour. If he was still at every hour, when it came, fated to feel the attractions of the fine arts but the second claim, they might be sure of their revenge; for no other man will ever visit Rome under such a despotic consciousness of duty as to refuse himself time for surveying the magnificence of its ruins. Such a sin against taste is far beyond the reach of common saintship to commit. It implied an inconceivable severity of conviction, that he had one thing to do, and that he who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity." Look a little over his wonderful