At other times, I have sat and watched the decaying embers in a little
_back_ painting-room (just as the wintry day declined,) and brooded
over the half-finished copy of a Rembrandt, or a landscape by Vangoyen,
placing it where it might catch a dim gleam of light from the fire;
while the Letter-Bell was the only sound that drew my thoughts to the
world without, and reminded me that I had a task to perform in it. As to
that landscape, methinks I see it now--

"The slow canal, the yellow-blossom'd vale,
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail."


There was a windmill, too, with a poor low clay-built cottage beside
it:--how delighted I was when I had made the tremulous, undulating
reflection in the water, and saw the dull canvass become a lucid mirror
of the commonest features of nature! Certainly, painting gives one a
strong interest in nature and humanity (it is not the _dandy-school_
of morals or sentiment)--

"While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."


Perhaps there is no part of a painter's life (if we must tell "the
secrets of the prison-house") in which he has more enjoyment of himself
and his art, than that in which after his work is over, and with furtive
sidelong glances at what he has done, he is employed in washing his
brushes and cleaning his pallet for the day. Afterwards, when he gets
a servant in livery to do this for him, he may have other and more