canvas as at the earlier ones and had judged him to the quick: you will
never be a great painter. If you cannot be content to remain less, quit,
stop!

Thus youth's choice and a man's half a lifetime of effort and ambition
ended in abandonment of effort not because he was a failure but because
the choice of a profession had been a blunder. A multitude of men topple
into this chasm and crawl out nobody. Few of them at middle age in the
darkness of that pit of failure can grope within themselves for some
second candle and by it once more become illumined through and through.
He found _his_ second candle,--it should have been his first,--and he
lighted it and it became the light of his later years; but it did not
illumine him completely, it never dispelled the shadows of the flame
that had burned out. What he did was this: having reached the end of his
own career as a painter, he turned and made his way back to the fields
of youth, and taking his stand by that ever fresh path, always, as
students would rashly pass him, he halted them like a wise monitor,
describing the best way to travel, warning of the difficulties of the
country ahead, but insisting that the goal was worth the toil and the
trouble; searching secretly among his pupils year after year for signs
of what he was not, a great painter, and pouring out his sympathies on
all those who, like himself, would never be one.

Now he sat looking across at his class, the masterful teacher of them.
They sat looking responsively at him. Then he took up his favorite
theme:

"Your work on this portrait is your best work, because the model, as I
stated to you at the outset would be the case, has called forth your
finer selves; she has caused you to _feel_. And she has been able to do