companions of his way. Like all other men around whom an engrossing
purpose wreathes itself, he was insulated from the mass of human kind.
He had no aim,--no pleasure,--no sympathies,--but what were ultimately
connected with his art.

Though gentle in manner, and upright in intent and fiction, he did not
possess kindly feelings; his heart was cold; no living creature could be
brought near enough to keep him warm. For these two beings, however, he
had felt, in its greatest intensity, the sort of interest which always
allied him to the subjects of his pencil. He had pried into their souls
with his keenest insight, and pictured the result upon their features,
with his utmost skill, so as barely to fall short of that standard which
no genius ever reached, his own severe conception. He had caught from
the duskiness of the future--at least, so he fancied--a fearful secret,
and had obscurely revealed it on the portraits. So much of himself--of
his imagination and all other powers--had been lavished on the study of
Walter and Elinor, that he almost regarded them as creations of his own,
like the thousands with which he had peopled the realms of Picture.
Therefore did they flit through the twilight of the woods, hover on the
mist of waterfalls, look forth from the mirror of the lake, nor melt away
in the noontide sun. They haunted his pictorial fancy, not as mockeries
of life, nor pale goblins of the dead, but in the guise of portraits,
each with the unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from the
caverns of the soul. He could not recross the Atlantic, till he had
again beheld the originals of those airy pictures.

"O glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the
street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable
forms, that wander in nothingness, start into being at thy beck. The
dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest