rd the end
of his life, and I was somewhat to wonder then where he had picked up
the aesthetic hint for the beautiful Page with a Falcon, if I have the
designation right, his other great bid for style and capture of
it--which we were long to continue to suppose perhaps the rarest of all
modern pictures. The feasting Romans were conceivable enough, I mean
_as_ a conception; no mystery hung about them--in the sense of one's
asking one's self whence they had come and by what romantic or
roundabout or nobly-dangerous journey; which is that air of the poetic
shaken out as from strong wings when great presences, in any one of the
arts, appear to alight. What I remember, on the other hand, of the
splendid fair youth in black velvet and satin or whatever who, while he
mounts the marble staircase, shows off the great bird on his forefinger
with a grace that shows _him_ off, was that it failed to help us to
divine, during that after-lapse of the glory of which I speak, by what
rare chance, for the obscured old ex-celebrity we visited, the heavens
had once opened. Poetry had swooped down, breathed on him for an hour
and fled. Such at any rate are the see-saws of reputations--which it
contributes to the interest of any observational lingering on this
planet to have caught so repeatedly in their weird motion; the question
of what may happen, under one's eyes, in particular cases, before that
motion sinks to rest, whether at the up or at the down end, being really
a bribe to one's own non-departure. Especially great the interest of
having noted all the rises and falls and of being able to compare the
final point--so far as any certainty may go as to that--either with the
greatest or the least previous altitudes; since it is only when there
have been exaltations (which is what is not commonest), that our
attention is most rewarded.

If the see-saw was to have operated indeed for Eugene Delacroix, our
next young admiration, though much more intelligently my brother's than
mine, that had already taken place and settled, for we were to go on
seeing him, and to the end, in firm possession of his crown, and to take
even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far
back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an
effect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have
been as sure of Paul Delaroche--for whom the pendulum was at last to be
arrested at a very different point. I could s