sad song from his own 'Samson,'--'_Total
eclipse, no sun, no moon_!' But I doubt whether I could put on
canvas that grand, mournful, blind face, turned eagerly towards the
stage, while tears ran swiftly from his sightless eyes. Again, I have
vague visions of a dead Schopenhauer, seated in the corner of the sofa,
with his pet poodle, Putz, howling at his master's ghastly white
features,--with his Indian Oupnekhat lying on his rigid knee, and
his gilded statuette of Gotama Buddha grinning at him from the
mantelpiece, welcoming him to Nirwana. There stands my easel, empty
and shrouded; and here, from day to day, I sit idle, not lacking
ideas, but the will to clothe them. Unlike poor Maurice de Guerin, who
said that his 'head was parching; that, like a tree which had lived
its life, he felt as though every passing wind were blowing through
dead branches in his top,' I feel that my brain is as vigorous and
restless as ever, while my will alone is paralyzed, and my heart
withered and cold within me."

"Your brush and palette will never yield you any permanent happiness,
nor promote a spirit of contentment, until you select a different
class of subjects. Your themes are all too sombre, too dismal, and the
sole _motif_ that runs through your music and painting seems to be _in
memoriam_. Open the windows of your gloomy soul, and let God's
sunshine stream into its cold recesses, and warm and gild and gladden
it. Throw aside your morbid proclivities for the melancholy and
abnormal, and paint peaceful _genre_ pictures,--a group of sunburnt,
laughing harvesters, or merry children, or tulip-beds with butterflies
swinging over them. You need more warmth in your heart, and more light
in your pictures."

"Eminently correct,--most incontestably true; but how do you propose
to remedy the imperfect _chiaro-oscuro_ of my character? Show me
the market where that light of peace and joy is bartered, and I
will constitute you my broker, with unlimited orders. No, no. I see
the fact as plainly as you do, but I know better than you how
irremediable it is. My soul is a doleful _morgue_, and my pictures
are dim photographs of its corpse-tenants. Shut in forever from the
sunshine, I dip my brush in the shadows that surround me, for,
like Empedocles,--

... 'I alone
Am dead to life and joy; therefore I read
In all things my own deadness.'"

"If you would free yourself from the coils of an intense and selfish
egoism that fe