yes as a cat laps milk.

This is the story of their honeymoon--the tale will perhaps not be lost
on some artists.

Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one
of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory
in Art--for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind--is
courage above all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have no
conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.

Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept
by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the right
and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the personification
of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born poet and dreamer,
had gone on from conception to execution, and overleaped, without
sounding it, the gulf that divides these two hemispheres of Art. To
muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation.
It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the life of a courtesan who
follows her own fancy. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy,
in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and
the aromatic juices of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as
a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But
gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it
to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning
with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean,
dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly
destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this
headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in
sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in
painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--This is the task of
execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward and
obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at command
than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which
makes a mother--that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly
understood--the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so difficult
to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the opportunity
of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor's edge, she is in the
air and flie