overwhelming peacefulness, still there had been two phantoms, the
companions of his way. Like all other men around whom an engrossing
purpose wreathes itself, he was insulated from the mass of humankind.
He had no aim, no pleasure, no sympathies, but what were ultimately
connected with his art. Though gentle in manner and upright in intent
and action, he did not possess kindly feelings; his heart was cold: no
living creature could be brought near enough to keep him warm. For
these two beings, however, he had felt in its greatest intensity the
sort 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 an 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.

"O 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