ntially he was the worshipper of the lip of flower, of dust
upon the moth wing, of the throat of young girl, or brow of young
boy, of the sudden flight of bird, the soft going of light clouds in a
windless sky. These were the gentle stimulants to his most virile
expression. Nor did his pictures ever contain more; they never
struggled beyond the quality of legend, at least as I know them. He
knew the loveliness in a profile, he saw always the evanescences of
light upon light and purposeless things. The action or incident in his
pictures was never more than the touch of some fair hand gently and
exquisitely brushing some swinging flower. He desired implicitly to
believe in the immortality of beauty, that things or entities once
they were beautiful could never die, at least for him. I followed
faithfully for a time these fine fragments in those corners of Paris
where they could be found, and there was always sure to be in them,
always and ever that perfect sense of all that is melodic in the
universe.

I do not know much of his early career as an artist. I have read
passages from letters which he wrote not so long ago, in which he
recounts with tenderness the dream life of his childhood, how he used
to stand in the field for hours or lie quietly upon some cool hill
shaded with young leaves, watching the clouds transforming themselves
into wing shapes and flower shapes, staining his fancy with the magic
of their delicate color and form--indeed, it would seem as if all
things had for him been born somewhere in the clouds and had
condescended to an earthward existence for a brief space, the better
to show their rarity of grace for the interval. Although obviously
rendered from the object, they were still-lifes which seemed to take
on a kind of cloud life during the very process of his creation. They
paid tribute to that simple and unaffected statement of his--"I have
fashioned an art after myself." Neither do I know just how long he was
the engraver and just how long he was the painter--it is evident
everywhere that his line is the line of the fastidious artist on steel
and stone.

Beyond these excessively frail renderings of his, whether in oil or in
pastel, I do not know him, but I am thinking always in the presence of
them that he listened very attentively and with more than a common ear
to the great masters in music, absorbing at every chance all that was
in them for him. He had in his spirit the classical outline of mu