templating the messengers of the past.
Every man has his own roll call of noble magicians selected from the
larger group. But here are the names with which this chapter began, with
some words on their work.

Albert Duerer is classed as a Renaissance painter. Yet his art has its
dwelling-place in the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness. And
the reader remembers Duerer's brooding muse called Melancholia that so
obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. But the wonder-quality went
into nearly all the Duerer wood-cuts and etchings. Rembrandt is a
prophet-wizard, not only in his shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of
holy scenes even his simplest cobweb lines become incantations. Other
artists in the high tides of history have had kindred qualities, but
coming close to our day, Elihu Vedder, the American, the illustrator of
the Rubaiyat, found it a poem questioning all things, and his very
illustrations answer in a certain fashion with winds of infinity, and
bring the songs of Omar near to the Book of Job. Vedder's portraits of
Lazarus and Samson are conceptions that touch the hem of the unknown.
George Frederick Watts was a painter of portraits of the soul itself, as
in his delineations of Burne-Jones and Morris and Tennyson.

It is a curious thing that two prophet-wizards have combined pictures and
song. Blake and Rossetti, whatever the failure of their technique, never
lacked in enchantment. Students of the motion picture side of poetry
would naturally turn to such men for spiritual precedents. Blake, that
strange Londoner, in his book of Job, is the paramount example of the
enchanter doing his work with the engraving tool in his hand.

Rossetti's Dante's Dream is a painting on the edge of every poet's
paradise. As for the poetry of these two men, there are Blake's Songs of
Innocence, and Rossetti's Blessed Damozel and his Burden of Nineveh.

As for the other poets, we have Coleridge, the author of Christabel, that
piece of winter witchcraft, Kubla Khan, that oriental dazzlement, and the
Ancient Mariner, that most English of all this list of enchantments. Of
Tennyson's work, besides Merlin and the Gleam, there are the poems when
the mantle was surely on his shoulders: The Lady of Shalott, The Lotus
Eaters, Sir Galahad, and St. Agnes' Eve.

Edgar Poe, always a magician, blends this power with the prophetical note
in the poem, The Haunted Palace, and in the stories of William Wilson,
The Black Cat and The Te