Anteros; gods whom my good tutor was wont so sedulously to
distinguish: you surely do not inveigh thus against all love?"

"I cry you mercy," said Warner, with something of sarcasm in his
pensiveness of tone. "We must not dispute; so I will hold my peace:
but make love all you will; what are the false smiles of a lip which a
few years can blight as an autumn leaf? what the homage of a heart as
feeble and mortal as your own? Why, I, with a few strokes of a little
hair and an idle mixture of worthless colours, will create a beauty in
whose mouth there shall be no hollowness, in whose lip there shall be
no fading; there, in your admiration, you shall have no need of
flattery and no fear of falsehood; you shall not be stung with
jealousy nor maddened with treachery; nor watch with a breaking heart
over the waning bloom, and departing health, till the grave open, and
your perishable paradise is not. No: the mimic work is mightier than
the original, for it outlasts it; your love cannot wither it, or your
desertion destroy; your very death, as the being who called it into
life, only stamps it with a holier value."

"And so then," said Clarence, "you would seriously relinquish, for the
mute copy of the mere features, those affections which no painting can
express?"

"Ay," said the painter, with an energy unusual to his quiet manner,
and slightly wandering in his answer from Clarence's remark, "ay, one
serves not two mistresses: mine is the glory of my art. Oh! what are
the cold shapes of this tame earth, where the footsteps of the gods
have vanished, and left no trace, the blemished forms, the debased
brows, and the jarring features, to the glorious and gorgeous images
which I can conjure up at my will? Away with human beauties, to him