“Then Breuning and Schindler left to go out to Wohring to select a grave. (Just after the five—I got this from Breuning himself—when it grew dark with the sudden storm Gerhard, who had been standing at the window, ran home to his teacher.)
“Afterward Gerhard v. B. went home, and there remained in the room only Huttenbrenner and Mrs. van Beethoven. The storm passed over, covering the Glacis with snow and sleet. As it passed away a flash of lightning lighted up everything. This was followed by an awful clap of thunder. Huttenbrenner had been sitting on the side of the bed sustaining Beethoven’s head—holding it up with his right arm His breathing was already very much impeded, and he had been for hours dying. At this startling, awful peal of thunder, the dying man suddenly raised his head from Huttenbrenner’s arm, stretched out his own right arm majestically—like a general giving orders to an army. This was but for an instant; the arm sunk back; he fell back. Beethoven was dead.
“Another talk with Huttenbrenner. It seems that Beethoven was at his last gasp, one eye already closed. At the stroke of lightning and the thunder peal he raised his arm with a doubled-up fist; the expression of his eyes and face was that of one defying death,—a look of defiance and power of resistance.
“He must have had his arm under the pillow. I must ask him.
“I did ask him; he had his arm around B.‘s neck.” H. E. K.]
311. “I am that which is. I am all that was, that is, and that shall be. No mortal man has ever lifted the veil of me. He is solely of himself, and to this Only One all things owe their existence.”
(Beethoven’s creed. He had found it in Champollion’s “The Paintings
of Egypt,” where it is set down as an inscription on a temple to the
goddess Neith. Beethoven had his copy framed and kept it constantly
before him on his writing desk. “The relic was a great treasure in his
eyes”—Schindler.)
312. “Wrapped in the shadows of eternal solitude, in the impenetrable darkness of the thicket, impenetrable, immeasurable, unapproachable, formlessly extended. Before spirit was breathed (into things) his spirit was, and his only. As mortal eyes (to compare finite and infinite things) look into a shining mirror.”
(Copied, evidently, from an unidentified work, by Beethoven; though
possibly original with him.)
313. “It was not the fortuitous meeting of the chordal atoms that made the world; if order and beauty are reflected in the constitution of the universe, then there is a God.”