his
imagination, that these qualities, almost more than any other,
characterize his conceptions: but the perpetual contact and presence of
elements so uncongenial to his good genius produced their effects in a
morbid sadness, in his feeling for subject, and in a gloomy tone of
coloring, sometimes only plaintive, but at other times as melancholy as
the voice of a lost soul. When healthiest, as in his Harem picture in
the Luxembourg Gallery, it is still in the minor key of that lovely
Eastern color-work, such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me
always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an
Aeolian harp, or the greetings of certain sad-voiced children touched by
the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone. No color has ever
affected me like that of Delacroix,--his Dante pictures are the
"Commedia" set in color, and palpitating with the woe of the damned.

His intellect was of that nobler kind which cannot leave the questions
of the Realities; and conscious kindred with great souls passed away
must have given a terrible reality to the great question of the future,
the terror of which French philosophy was poorly able to dispel or lead
to anything else than this hopeless gloom. His great picture of the
_plafond_ of the Salon d'Apollon, in the Louvre, seems like a great ode
to light, in the singing of which he felt the gloom break and saw the
tones of healthy life lighten in his day for a prophetic moment; but
_dispelled_ the gloom _never_ was. What he might have been, bred in the
cheerful, unquestioning, and healthy, if unprogressive faith of Venice,
we can only conjecture, seeing how great he grew in the cold of Gallic
life.

His health was, through his later life, bad; and for my own part, I
believe that the same morbid feeling manifested in his art affected
injuriously his physical life, aided doubtless by the excessive work
which occupied all his available hours. For many years previous to his
death he alternated between periods of almost unbroken labor, taking
time only to eat and sleep, and intervals of absolute rest for days
together. In his working fits, so deranged had his digestion become, he
could take only one meal, a late dinner, each day, and saw no visitors
except in the hour preceding his dinner.

Having gone to Paris to spend a winter in professional studies, I made
an earnest application by letter to Delacroix to be admitted as a pupil
to his _atelier_. In reply,