t of interest which always allied him to the subjects of his pencil.
He had pried into their souls with his keenest insight, and pictured
the result upon their features with his utmost skill, so as barely to
fall short of that standard which no genius ever reached, his own
severe conception. He had caught from the duskiness of the future--at
least, so he fancied--a fearful secret, and had obscurely revealed it
on the portraits. So much of himself--of his imagination and all other
powers--had been lavished on the study of Walter and Elinor, that he
almost regarded them as creations of his own, like the thousands with
which he had peopled the realms of Picture. Therefore did they flit
through the twilight of the woods, hover on the mist of waterfalls,
look forth from the mirror of the lake, nor melt away in the noontide
sun. They haunted his pictorial fancy, not as mockeries of life, nor
pale goblins of the dead, but in the guise of portraits, each with the
unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from the caverns of
the soul. He could not recross the Atlantic, till he had again beheld
the originals of those airy pictures.

"Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the
street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable
forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The
dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest
their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and
immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of History. With
thee, there is no Past; for, at thy touch, all that is great becomes
forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages, in the
visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.
Oh, potent Art! as thou bringest the faintly revealed Past to stand in
that narrow strip of sunlight which we call Now, canst thou summon the
shrouded Future to meet her there? Have I not achieved it! Am I not
thy Prophet?"

Thus with a proud yet melancholy fervor did he almost cry aloud, as he
passed through the toilsome street, among people that knew not of his
reveries, nor could understand nor care for them. It is not good for
man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him
by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and
hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the
reality, of a madman. Reading other bosoms,