One of Cowper's visitors and pensioners at Olney was a poor school-master (Teedon) who thought himself specially favored by Providence, and to whom Cowper communicated his waking dreams, and consulted, as a person whom the Lord was pleased to answer in prayer. This recalls a similar fact of the illustrious Tycho Brahe. When he lived in Uraniberg he maintained an idiot of the name of Lep, who lay at his feet whenever he sat down to dinner, and whom he fed with his own hand. Persuaded that his mind, when moved, was capable of fore-telling future events, Tycho carefully marked everything he said. (Striking instances, it may be observed, of the tribute which intelligence and science unconsciously pay to faith.)
It is pathetic to think, says Alger, how many great men have, like Homer and Milton, had the windows of their souls closed. Galileo, in his seventy-third year, wrote to one of his correspondents, "Alas! your dear friend has become irreparably blind. These heavens, this earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I had enlarged a thousand times past the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow space which I myself occupy. So it pleases God; it shall, therefore, please me also." Händel passed the last seven years of his life in total blindness, in the gloom of the porch of death. How he and the spectators must have felt when the great composer, in 1753, stood pale and tremulous, with his sightless eyeballs turned toward a tearful concourse of people, while his sad song from Samson, "Total eclipse, no sun, no moon," was delivered! Leigh Hunt said of Händel: He was the grandest composer that is known to have existed, wielding, as it were, the choirs of heaven and earth together. Mozart said of him, that he struck you, whenever he pleased, with a thunderbolt. His hallelujahs open the heavens. He utters the word "wonderful," as if all their trumpets spoke together.
Beethoven was afflicted with "dense and incurable deafness" long before he had composed his greatest works. He said, "I was nigh taking my life with my own hands. But art held me back. I could not leave the world until I had revealed what lay within me." He occupied for a long time a room in a remote house on a hill, and was called the Solitary of the Mountain, where he heard, no doubt, more distinctly "the voices," than if he had been blest with the best of ears. "When he produced his mighty opera, Fidelio, it failed. In vain he again modeled and remodeled it. He went himself into the orchestra and attempted to lead it; and the pitiless public of Vienna laughed." His work so far surpassed the appreciation of many of his contemporaries as to be condemned as the vagaries of a madman. Haydn and Mozart, as was said, had perfected instrumental music in form; it remained for deaf Beethoven to touch it, so that it became a living soul.