All this Beethoven said to me the first time I saw him; a feeling of reverential awe came over me when he expressed himself to me with such friendly frankness, seeing that I must have appeared so utterly insignificant to him. I was surprised, too, for I had been told that he was unsociable and would converse with nobody. They were afraid to take me to him; I had to hunt him up alone. He has three lodgings in which he conceals himself alternately--one in the country, one in the city and the third on the bastion. It was in the last that I found him in the third storey, walked in unannounced. He was seated at the pianoforte. He accompanied me home and on the way he said the many beautiful things about art, speaking so loud and stopping in the street that it took courage to listen to him. He spoke with great earnestness and much too surprisingly not to make me forget the street. They were greatly surprised to see him enter a large dinner party at home with me. After dinner, without being asked, he sat down to the instrument and played long and marvellously; there was a simultaneous fermentation of his pride and his genius. When he is in such a state of exaltation his spirit begets the incomprehensible and his fingers accomplish the impossible. In the letter to Pückler-Muskau in which Mme. von Arnim dwells more upon the incidents of this meeting, she writes thus: There was surprise when I entered a gathering of more than 40 people who sat at table, hand in hand with Beethoven. Without ado he seated himself, said little (doubtless because he was deaf). Twice he took his writing-tablet out of his pocket and made a few marks in it. After dinner the entire company went up to the tower of the house to look at the view; when they were gone down again and he and I alone, he drew forth his tablet, looked at it, wrote and elided, then said: “My song is finished.” He leaned against the window-frame and sang it out upon the air. Then he said: “That sounds, doesn’t it? It belongs to you if you like it, I made it for you, you inspired it, I read it in your eyes just as it was written.” In the Goethe letter she continues: