ld be brought near enough to keep him warm. For
these two beings, however, he had felt in its greatest intensity the
sort of interest which always allied him to the subjects of his
pencil. He had pried into their souls with his keenest insight and
pictured the result upon their features with his utmost skill, so as
barely to fall short of that standard which no genius ever reached,
his own severe conception. He had caught from the duskiness of the
future--at least, so he fancied--a fearful secret, and had obscurely
revealed it on the portraits. So much of himself--of his imagination
and all other powers--had been lavished on the study of Walter and
Elinor that he almost regarded them as creations of his own, like the
thousands with which he had peopled the realms of Picture. Therefore
did they flit through the twilight of the woods, hover on the mist of
waterfalls, look forth from the mirror of the lake, nor melt away in
the noontide sun. They haunted his pictorial fancy, not as mockeries
of life nor pale goblins of the dead, but in the guise of portraits,
each with an unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from
the caverns of the soul. He could not recross the Atlantic till he had
again beheld the originals of those airy pictures.

"O glorious Art!" Thus mused the enthusiastic painter as he trod the
street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable
forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The
dead live again; thou recallest them to their old scenes and givest
their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and
immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of history. With
then there is no past, for at thy touch all that is great becomes for
ever present, and illustrious men live through long ages in the
visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are. O
potent Art! as thou bringest the faintly-revealed past to stand in
that narrow strip of sunlight which we call 'now,' canst thou summon
the shrouded future to meet her there? Have I not achieved it? Am I
not thy prophet?"

Thus with a proud yet melancholy fervor did he almost cry aloud as he
passed through the toilsome street among people that knew not of his
reveries nor could understand nor care for them. It is not good for
man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him
by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires and
hopes will become e