them at middle age in the
darkness of that pit of failure can grope within themselves for some
second candle and by it once more become illumined through and through.
He found _his_ second candle,--it should have been his first,--and he
lighted it and it became the light of his later years; but it did not
illumine him completely, it never dispelled the shadows of the flame
that had burned out. What he did was this: having reached the end of his
own career as a painter, he turned and made his way back to the fields
of youth, and taking his stand by that ever fresh path, always, as
students would rashly pass him, he halted them like a wise monitor,
describing the best way to travel, warning of the difficulties of the
country ahead, but insisting that the goal was worth the toil and the
trouble; searching secretly among his pupils year after year for signs
of what he was not, a great painter, and pouring out his sympathies on
all those who, like himself, would never be one.

Now he sat looking across at his class, the masterful teacher of them.
They sat looking responsively at him. Then he took up his favorite
theme:

"Your work on this portrait is your best work, because the model, as I
stated to you at the outset would be the case, has called forth your
finer selves; she has caused you to _feel_. And she has been able to do
this because her countenance, her whole being, radiates one of the great
passions and faiths of our common humanity--the look of reverent
motherhood. You recognize that look, that mood; you believe in it; you
honor it; you have worked over its living eloquence. Observe, then, the
result. Turn to your canvases and see how, though proceeding
differently, you have all dipped your brushes as in a common medium;
how you have all drawn an identical line around that old-time human
landmark. You have in truth copied from her one of the great
beacon-lights of expression that has been burning and signaling through
ages upon ages of human history--the look of the mother, the angel of
self-sacrifice to the earth.

"While we wait, we might go a little way into this general matter, since
you, in the study of portraiture, will always have to deal with it. This
look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other
great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner
energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as
ages pass, human life changes; its chief ele