presence.

Time wore on; and the painter came again. He had been far enough to the
north to see the silver cascade of the Crystal Hills, and to look over
the vast round of cloud and forest, from the summit of New England's
loftiest mountain. But he did not profane that scene by the mockery of
his art. He had also lain in a canoe on the bosom of Lake George, making
his soul the mirror of its loveliness and grandeur, till not a picture in
the Vatican was more vivid than his recollection. He had gone with the
Indian hunters to Niagara, and there, again, had flung his hopeless
pencil down the precipice, feeling that he could as soon paint the roar,
as aught else that goes to make up the wondrous cataract. In truth, it
was seldom his impulse to copy natural scenery, except as a framework for
the delineations of the human form and face, instinct with thought,
passion, or suffering. With store of such, his adventurous ramble had
enriched him; the stern dignity of Indian chiefs; the dusky loveliness of
Indian girls; the domestic life of wigwams; the stealthy march; the
battle beneath gloomy pine-trees; the frontier fortress with its
garrison; the anomaly of the old French partisan, bred in courts, but
grown gray in shaggy deserts;--such were the scenes and portraits that he
had sketched. The glow of perilous moments; flashes of wild feeling;
struggles of fierce power; love, hate, grief, frenzy; in a word, all the
worn-out heart of the old earth had been revealed to him under a new
form. His portfolio was filled with graphic illustrations of the volume
of his memory, which genius would transmute into its own substance, and
imbue with immortality. He felt that the deep wisdom in his art, which
he had sought so far, was found.

But, amid stern or lovely nature, in the perils of the forest, or its
overwhelming peacefulness, still there had been two phantoms, the