him.

When he reached the upper landing of the spiral ascent, he paused a
moment before laying hold of a grotesque knocker which ornamented the
door of the atelier where the famous painter of Henry IV.--neglected
by Marie de Medicis for Rubens--was probably at work. The young man
felt the strong sensation which vibrates in the soul of great artists
when, in the flush of youth and of their ardor for art, they approach
a man of genius or a masterpiece. In all human sentiments there are,
as it were, primeval flowers bred of noble enthusiasms, which droop
and fade from year to year, till joy is but a memory and glory a lie.
Amid such fleeting emotions nothing so resembles love as the young
passion of an artist who tastes the first delicious anguish of his
destined fame and woe,--a passion daring yet timid, full of vague
confidence and sure discouragement. Is there a man, slender in
fortune, rich in his spring-time of genius, whose heart has not beaten
loudly as he approached a master of his art? If there be, that man
will forever lack some heart-string, some touch, I know not what, of
his brush, some fibre in his creations, some sentiment in his poetry.
When braggarts, self-satisfied and in love with themselves, step early
into the fame which belongs rightly to their future achievements, they
are men of genius only in the eyes of fools. If talent is to be
measured by youthful shyness, by that indefinable modesty which men
born to glory lose in the practice of their art, as a pretty woman
loses hers among the artifices of coquetry, then this unknown young
man might claim to be possessed of genuine merit. The habit of success
lessens doubt; and modesty, perhaps, is doubt.

Worn down with poverty and discouragement, and dismayed at this moment
by his own presumption, the young neophyte might not have dared to