determined for his liking, and he wondered why some of Rembrandt's
pictures, like _The Woman taken in Adultery_, should be so mysterious and
poetical, and others like this old lady so lifelike and straightforward. He
was too young to understand that the composition of the fortuitous
concourse of atoms called Rembrandt, included not only the power that
Velasquez possessed in so supreme a degree of painting just what his eyes
saw, exemplified by this portrait of _An Old Lady_, aged 83, and by the
portrait of _Elizabeth Bas_ at Amsterdam, but that it also included the
great gift of creative imagination, exemplified by the _Christ at Emmaus_,
and _The Good Samaritan_ of the Louvre, and in a way by the _Portrait of a
Slav Prince_ at the Hermitage, where a man in the alembic of Rembrandt's
imagination has become a type. Also in _The Reconciliation of David and
Absalom_ at the Hermitage, where behind the sham trappings of the figures
shine the eternal motives of reconciliation and forgiveness.

When the child was much older he saw the _Christ at Emmaus_, and _The Good
Samaritan_ in the little room at the Louvre, hanging side by side, and he
never forget the hour that he spent with them. He had seen, year by year,
many of the world's pictures; but at the sight of these two works, his
childish predilection for Rembrandt became a deep-rooted reverence and
admiration, which was never to pass from him.

Here was Rembrandt the seer, the man who had suffered. Saskia was dead,
his popularity gone; but the effect of these things was but to fill his
heart with a world sympathy, with pity for all who sorrow. Again and again
he treated the _Christ at Emmaus_, _The Good Samaritan_, and _The Prodigal
Son_ themes. "Some strange presentment of his own fate," says M. Michel,
"seems to have haunted the artist, making him keenly susceptible to the
story of _The Good Samaritan_. He too was destined to be stripped and
wounded by Life's wayside, while many passed him by unheeding."