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Adela Cathcart, Volume 3 by George MacDonald
page 111 of 207 (53%)
dreary, desolate aspect. It looked as if no one ever went out or in. It
was like a place on which decay had fallen because there was no indwelling
spirit. The mud of years was baked upon its door, and no faces looked out
of its dusty windows.

"How then could she be the most celebrated beauty of Prague? How then was
it that Heinrich Hoellenrachen knew her the moment he saw her? Above all,
how was it that Karl Wolkenlicht had, in fact, fallen in love with her
before ever he saw her? It was thus--

"Her father was a painter. Belonging thus to the public, it had taken the
liberty of re-naming him. Every one called him Teufelsbuerst, or
Devilsbrush. It was a name with which, to judge from the nature of his
representations, he could hardly fail to be pleased. For, not as a
nightmare dream, which may alternate with the loveliest visions, but as
his ordinary everyday work, he delighted to represent human suffering.

"Not an aspect of human woe or torture, as expressed in countenance or
limb, came before his willing imagination, but he bore it straightway to
his easel. In the moments that precede sleep, when the black space
before the eyes of the poet teems with lovely faces, or dawns into a
spirit-landscape, face after face of suffering, in all varieties of
expression, would crowd, as if compelled by the accompanying fiends, to
present themselves, in awful levee, before the inner eye of the expectant
master. Then he would rise, light his lamp, and, with rapid hand, make
notes of his visions; recording, with swift successive sweeps of his
pencil, every individual face which had rejoiced his evil fancy. Then he
would return to his couch, and, well satisfied, fall asleep to dream yet
further embodiments of human ill.

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