that flame darts up and soars!--that flame is my spirit! Look--is it
not restless?--does it not aspire bravely?--why, all its brother
flames are grovellers to it!--and now,--why don't you look!--it
falters--fades--droops--and--ha--ha--ha! poor idler, the fuel is
consumed--and--it is darkness."

As Warner uttered these words his eyes reeled; the room swam before
him; the excitement of his feeble frame had reached its highest pitch;
the disease of many weeks had attained its crisis; and, tottering back
a few paces, he fell upon the floor, the victim of a delirious and
raging fever.

But it was not thus that the young artist was to die. He was reserved
for a death that, like his real nature, had in it more of gentleness
and poetry. He recovered by slow degrees, and his mind, almost in
spite of himself, returned to that profession from which it was
impossible to divert the thoughts and musings of many years. Not that
he resumed the pencil and the easel: on the contrary, he could not
endure them in his sight; they appeared, to a mind festered and sore,
like a memorial and monument of shame. But he nursed within him a
strong and ardent desire to become a pilgrim to that beautiful land of
which he had so often dreamed, and which the innocent destroyer of his
peace had pointed out as the theatre of inspiration and the nursery of
future fame.

The physicians who, at Talbot's instigation, attended him, looked at
his hectic cheek and consumptive frame, and readily flattered his
desire; and Talbot, no less interested in Warner's behalf on his own
account than bound by his promise to Clarence, generously extended to
the artist that bounty which is the most precious prerogative of the