(Diary, 1812-18.)
303. “We finite ones with infinite souls are born only for sorrows and joy and it might almost be said that the best of us receive joy through sorrow.”
(October 19, 1815, to Countess Erdody.)
304. “He is a base man who does not know how to die; I knew it as a boy of fifteen.”
(In the spring of 1816, to Miss Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, when
Beethoven felt ill and spoke of dying. It is not known that he was ever
near death in his youth.)
305. “A second and third generation recompenses me three and fourfold for the ill-will which I had to endure from my former contemporaries.”
(Copied into his Diary from Goethe’s “West-ostlicher Divan.”)
306.
“My hour at last is come;
Yet not ingloriously or passively
I die, but first will do some valiant deed,
Of which mankind shall hear in after
time.”—Homer.
(“The Iliad” [Bryant’s translation], Book XXII, 375-378.)