does business on a very small margin of inspiration. Do you
understand me? The man of genius is not a genius all the time. Usually he
is only a very ordinary individual. There may be days or weeks that are
fallow, and sometimes even years that are years of famine. He can not
conquer the mood of depression that is holding him to earth.

But some day the clouds suddenly clear away, the sun bursts out, and the
soul of the man is alive with divine fervor. Sublime thoughts crowd upon
him, great waves of emotion sweep over his soul, and as Webster said of
his Hayne speech, "The air was full of reasons, and all I had to do was
to reach up and seize them."

All great music and all deathless poems are written in a fever of
ecstasy; all paintings that move men to tears are painted in tears.

But it is easy to break in upon the sublime mood and drag the genius back
to earth. Certain country cousins who occasionally visited the family of
Ralph Waldo Emerson cut all mental work off short; the philosopher laid
down his pen when the cousins came a-cousining and literally took to the
woods. An uncongenial caller would instantly unhorse Carlyle, and
Tennyson had a hatred of all lion-hunters--not merely because they were
lion-hunters, but because they broke in upon his paradise and snapped the
thread of inspiration.

Mrs. Grote tells us that Scheffer's wife was intelligent and devoted--in
fact, she was too devoted. She would bring her sewing and watch the
artist at his work. If the great man grew oblivious of her presence she
gently chided him for it; she was jealous of his brothers, jealous of his
daughter, even jealous of his art. She insisted not only that he should
love her, but demanded that he should love nothing else. And yet all the
time she was putting forth violent efforts to make him happy. As a result
she put him in a mood where he loved nothing and nobody. She clipped his
wings, and instead of a soaring genius we find a whimsical, commonplace
man with occupation gone.

Wives demand the society of their husbands as their lawful right, and I
suppose it is expecting too much to suppose that any woman, short of a
saint, could fit into the bachelor ways of a dreamer of dreams, aged
fifty-five.

Before he met the widow of General Beaudrand, Scheffer was happy, with a
sweet, sad happiness in the memories of the love of his youth--the love
that was lost, and being lost still lived and filled his heart.

But the society of the