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hath two birth days two days at least in every year which set him upon revolving the lapse of time as it affects his mortal duration the one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his in the gradual desuetude of old observances this custom of solemnizing our proper birth day hath nearly passed away or is left to children who reflect nothing at all about the matter nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange but the birth of a new year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler no one ever regarded the first of january with indifference it is that from which all date their time and count upon what is left it is the nativity of our common adam of all sounds of all bells bells the music nighest bordering upon heaven most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the old year i never hear it without a gathering up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth all i have done or suffered performed or neglected in that regretted time i begin to know its worth as when a person dies it takes a personal colour nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary when he exclaimed i saw the skirts of the departing year it is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave taking i am sure i felt it and all felt it with me last night though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor but i am none of those who welcome the coming speed the parting guest i am naturally beforehand shy of novelties new books new faces new years from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective i have almost ceased to hope and am sanguine only in the prospects of other former years i plunge into foregone visions and conclusions i encounter pell mell with past disappointments i am armour proof against old discouragements i forgive or overcome in fancy old adversaries i play over again for love as the gamesters phrase it games for which i once paid so dear i would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed i would no more alter them than the incidents of some well contrived novel methinks it is better that i should have pined away seven of my goldenest years when i was thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of alice w n than that so passionate a love adventure should be lost it was better that our family should have missed that legacy which old dorrell cheated us of than that i should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco and be without the idea of that specious old rogue in a degree beneath manhood it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days do i advance a paradox when i say that skipping over the intervention of forty years a man may have leave to love himself without the imputation of self love if i know aught of myself no one whose mind is introspective and mine is painfully so can have a less respect for his present identity than i have for the man elia i know him to be light and vain and humorsome a notorious addicted to averse from counsel neither taking it nor offering it besides a stammering buffoon what you will lay it on and spare not i subscribe to it all and much more than thou canst be willing to lay at his door but for the child elia that other me there in the back ground i must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master with as little reference i protest to this stupid changeling of five and forty as if it had been a child of some other house and not of my parents i can cry over its patient small pox at five and rougher medicaments i can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at christ s and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it that unknown had watched its sleep i know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood god help thee elia how art thou changed thou art sophisticated i know how honest how courageous for a weakling it was how religious how imaginative how hopeful from what have i not fallen if the child i remember was indeed myself and not some dissembling guardian presenting a false identity to give the rule to my unpractised steps and regulate the tone of my moral being that i am fond of indulging beyond a hope of sympathy in such retrospection may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy or is it owing to another cause simply that being without wife or family i have not learned to project myself enough out of myself and having no offspring of my own to dally with i turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea as my heir and favourite if these speculations seem fantastical to thee reader a busy man perchance if i tread out of the way of thy sympathy and am singularly conceited only i retire impenetrable to ridicule under the phantom cloud of elia the elders with whom i was brought up were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution and the ringing out of the old year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony in those days the sound of those midnight chimes though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy yet i then scarce conceived what it meant or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me not childhood alone but the young man till thirty never feels practically that he is mortal he knows it indeed and if need were he could preach a homily on the fragility of life but he brings it not home to himself any more than in a hot june we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of december but now shall i confess a truth i feel these audits but too powerfully i begin to count the probabilities of my duration and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods like miser s farthings in proportion as the years both lessen and shorten i set more count upon their periods and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel i am not content to pass away like a weaver s shuttle those metaphors solace me not nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality i care not to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny i am in love with this green earth the face of town and country the unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets i would set up my tabernacle here i am content to stand still at the age to which i am arrived i and my friends to be no younger no richer no handsomer i do not want to be weaned by age or drop like mellow fruit as they say into the grave any alteration on this earth of mine in diet or in lodging puzzles and discomposes me my household gods plant a terrible fixed foot and are not rooted up without blood they do not willingly seek lavinian shores a new state of being staggers me sun and sky and breeze and solitary walks and summer holidays and the greenness of fields and the delicious juices of meats and fishes and society and the cheerful glass and candle light and fire side conversations and innocent vanities and jests and irony itself do these things go out with life can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides when you are pleasant with him and you my midnight darlings my folios must i part with the intense delight of having you huge armfuls in my embraces must knowledge come to me if it come at all by some awkward experiment of intuition and no longer by this familiar process of reading shall i enjoy friendships there wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here the recognisable face the sweet assurance of a look in winter this intolerable disinclination to dying to give it its mildest name does more especially haunt and beset me in a genial august noon beneath a sweltering sky death is almost problematic at those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality then we expand and burgeon then are we as strong again as valiant again as wise again and a great deal taller the blast that nips and shrinks me puts me in thoughts of death all things allied to the insubstantial wait upon that master feeling cold numbness dreams perplexity moonlight itself with its shadowy and spectral appearances that cold ghost of the sun or phoebus sickly sister like that innutritious one denounced in the canticles i am none of her minions i hold with the persian whatsoever thwarts or puts me out of my way brings death into my mind all partial evils like humours run into that capital plague sore i have heard some profess an indifference to life such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge and speak of the grave as of some soft arms in which they may slumber as on a pillow some have wooed death but out upon thee i say thou foul ugly phantom i detest abhor execrate and with friar john give thee to six score thousand devils as in no instance to be excused or tolerated but shunned as a universal viper to be branded proscribed and spoken evil of in no way can i be brought to digest thee thou thin melancholy privation or more frightful and confounding positive those antidotes prescribed against the fear of thee are altogether frigid and insulting like thyself for what satisfaction hath a man that he shall lie down with kings and emperors in death who in his life time never greatly coveted the society of such bed fellows or forsooth that so shall the fairest face appear why to comfort me must alice w n be a goblin more than all i conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism that such as he now is i must shortly be not so shortly friend perhaps as thou imaginest in the meantime i am alive i move about i am worth twenty of thee know thy betters thy new years days are past i survive a jolly candidate for 1821 another cup of wine and while that turn coat bell that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed with changed notes lustily rings in a successor let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion by hearty cheerful mr cotton the new year hark the cock crows and yon bright star tells us the day himself s not far and see where breaking from the night he gilds the western hills with light with him old janus doth appear peeping into the future year with such a look as seems to say the prospect is not good that way thus do we rise ill sights to see and gainst ourselves to prophesy when the prophetic fear of things a more tormenting mischief brings more full of soul tormenting gall than direst mischiefs can befall but stay but stay methinks my sight better inform d by clearer light discerns sereneness in that brow that all contracted seem d but now his revers d face may show distaste and frown upon the ills are past but that which this way looks is clear and smiles upon the new born year he looks too from a place so high the year lies open to his eye and all the moments open are to the exact discoverer yet more and more he smiles upon the happy revolution why should we then suspect or fear the influences of a year so smiles upon us the first morn and speaks us good so soon as born plague on t the last was ill enough this cannot but make better proof or at the worst as we brush d through the last why so we may this too and then the next in reason shou d be superexcellently good for the worst ills we daily see have no more perpetuity than the best fortunes that do fall which also bring us wherewithal longer their being to support than those do of the other sort and who has one good year in three and yet repines at destiny appears ungrateful in the case and merits not the good he has then let us welcome the new guest with lusty brimmers of the best mirth always should good fortune meet and renders e en disaster sweet and though the princess turn her back let us but line ourselves with sack we better shall by far hold out till the next year she face about how say you reader do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity of the old english vein do they not fortify like a cordial enlarging the heart and productive of sweet blood and generous spirits in the concoction where be those puling fears of death just now expressed or affected passed like a cloud absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry clean washed away by a wave of genuine helicon your only spa for these hypochondries and now another cup of the generous and a merry new year and many of them to you all my masters posted by aussiegirl 8 37 pm 13 comments sunday december 16 2007 music the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have below the immortal beethoven was born on this day in 1770 237 long years ago there is however some dispute as to the exact day according to wikipedia beethoven s date of birth usually given as december 16 is not known with certainty but is inferred from circumstantial evidence well into adulthood beethoven believed he had been born in 1772 and told friends the 1770 baptism was of his older brother ludwig maria who died in infancy but ludwig maria s baptism is recorded as taking place in 1769 some biographers assert that his father falsified his date of birth in an attempt to pass him off as a child prodigy like wolfgang amadeus mozart but this is disputed children of that era were usually baptized the day after birth but there is no documentary evidence that this occurred in beethoven s case it is known that his family and his teacher johann albrechtsberger celebrated his birthday on 16 december while the evidence supports the probability that 16 december 1770 was beethoven s date of birth this cannot be stated with certainty what is not in dispute is the magnitude of his genius and the ineffable beauty of his music here is leonard bernstein in his the joy of music on one aspect of that music many many composers have been able to write heavenly tunes and respectable fugues some composers can orchestrate the c major scale so that it sounds like a masterpiece or fool with notes so that a harmonic novelty is achieved but this is all mere dust nothing compared to the magic ingredient sought by them all the inexplicable ability to know what the next note has to be beethoven had this gift in a degree that leaves them all panting in the rear guard beethoven broke all the rules and turned out pieces of breath taking rightness rightness that s the word when you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant in that context then chances are you re listening to beethoven melodies fugues rhythms leave them to the chaikovskys and hindemiths and ravels our boy has the real goods the stuff from heaven the power to make you feel at the finish something is right in the world there is something that checks throu...