It is now nearly a year since his labors on earth terminated, and yet no
adequate account of his life and labors has appeared. It is very
difficult to satisfy the craving desire to know more of the personal
life and character of him who has been a household friend so long. Yet
it is rather the privilege of succeeding generations, than of
contemporaries, to draw aside the veil from the sanctuary, and to behold
the works of a man in his greatest art,--the art of life. But the cold
waters of the Atlantic, like the river of Death, make the person of a
European artist sacred to us; and it is hard for us to realize that
those whom we have surrounded with a halo of classic reverence were
partakers of the daily jar and turmoil of our busy age,--that the good
physician who tended our sick children so faithfully had lived in
familiar intercourse with Goethe, and might have listened to the first
performance of those symphonies of Beethoven which seem to us as eternal
as the mountains. Losing the effluence of his personal presence, which
his neighbors and countrymen enjoyed, we demand the privilege of
posterity to hear and tell all that can be told of him. We can wait
fifty years more for a biography of Allston, because something of his
gracious presence yet lingers among us; but we can touch Scheffer only
with the burin or the pen. So we shall throw in our mite to fill up this
chasm. A few gleanings from current French literature, a few anecdotes
familiarly told of the great artist, and the vivid recollection of one
short interview are all the aids we can summon to enable our readers to
call up in their own minds a living image which will answer to the name
that has so long been familiar to our lips and dear to our hearts.

Ary Scheffer was born about the year 1795, in the town of Dordrecht, in
Holland; but, as at that period Holland belonged to the French Empire,
the child was entitled by birth to those privileges of a French citizen
which opened to him important advantages in his artistic career. French