"_Stürzte_ sich der Himmelsliebe Kuss Auf mich herab in ernsber Sabbath stille."
When Beethoven wrote this music he had not in mind his revered Shakespeare's magnificent--
"Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heaving alchemy."
This, rather, the immortal Symphony in A suggests; or such lines as these:--
"My other mighty passion was for thee, Thou glimmering, glamouring, manifestation of God! Unspeakable Nature, with thy distant sea, Wave-framing hills, dim woods, and flowery sod; My haziest, sweetest memories, are of you, Where inland-county beauty guards its stream; Oh! 'violet' memory 'dim' with _my_ tears' dew; Oh! shadowy pausing, touch'd with earliest beam; And sea-side recollections stir my heart, The calm's majestic cheerfulness, the storm, The bluff that through the vapours seem'd to start, A thousand miracles of tint and form; And ever as I yearn'd on wave and hill, The unconscious secret was thy Promise still."
"I draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river; Men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever."
(exquisite image of immortality bearing along mortality)--is richer in significance. There, indeed, we do get some of those deep glimpses, far glances (and tender ones into flower-cups)--those unspeakable hints (note especially, as usual, the passage in the extra-poetic key of G flat; where, however, also as usual, Beethoven lingers too little; indeed, even he seems rather to _deviate_ into such keys, and to be afraid of dwelling in them). We see Beethoven, the colossally _un_happy soul, here at least happy, nay, blessed; lapped in flowers; caressed by the stream; soothed and tended by all the "angels and ministers of grace" of nature; while the everlasting heaven pronounces its benediction over him.
For our own part, we are specially affected, because we call to mind a brook where we also were wont to be happy. But, it was not in quiet scenery, but in a Swiss mountain-valley; the brook came from heaven, and coursed through pine-woods and pastures into a stupendously beautiful lake, the shadows of whose mighty guardian Alps are reflected also in the Moonlight Sonata; while, afar off, as it were in colossal admonition, towered those eternal reminders, the peaks of the Bernese Oberland.