elt that his look told me clearly everything which has been in me so
long, in the form of presentiment, but which a thousand doubts and
misgivings have pressed down and prevented from shooting up into life.
Can I not be a great artist, in spite of my abominable calling?'

"Traugott got out all the drawings he had ever done, and looked through
them critically. Much of his work struck him quite differently from
what it had formerly done, and generally seemed much better than he had
thought. There was one drawing particularly--one of his childish
attempts, done in his early boyhood--a leaf, on which the old
burgomaster and the page were copied, in somewhat distorted, but
clearly recognizable outlines; and he remembered well that, even in
these early days, those figures had a strange influence upon him, and
that he was once, in the gloaming, impelled, as by an irresistible
spell, to leave his play and go to the Artus Hof, where he laboured
diligently at copying them. He was moved by the deepest, most
melancholy yearning as he looked at this drawing. He ought by rights to
have gone to the office for a couple of hours as usual, but he felt
that he could not; and, instead, he went out and up on to the
Karlsberg. Thence he looked out over the sea: and in the dashing
billows, in the grey evening haze rising, and lying in wonderful
shapes of cloud-vapour over Hela, he strove to read, as in a magic
mirror, the destiny of his future life.

"Do you not hold, dear reader, that that which comes down into our
breasts from the higher realm of love has to reveal itself to us at
first as hopeless sorrow? That is the doubt, the misgiving, which comes
surging into the artist's heart. He sees the ideal, and feels his
powerlessness to grasp it. But then there comes to him a godlike
courage; he makes endeavour, and his despair melts away into a sweet
longing which gives him strength, and incites him to approach nearer
and nearer to that Unattainable which he never reaches, though always
getting closer to it.

"Traugott was now powerfully attacked by this hopeless pain. When,
early the next morning, he looked again at his drawings, they all
seemed feeble and wretched, and he remembered what an experienced
friend had often said: that great mischief, together with very mediocre
results in art, proceed from the circumstance that people often mistake
mere vivid, superficial excitement for a true, inward calling for art.
He was much disposed to l