“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 their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal.  Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of history.  With then there is no past, for at thy touch all that is great becomes for ever present, and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.  O potent Art! as thou bringest the faintly-revealed past to stand in that narrow strip of sunlight which we call ‘now,’ canst thou summon the shrouded future to meet her there?  Have I not achieved it?  Am I not thy prophet?”

Thus with a proud yet melancholy fervor did he almost cry aloud as he passed through the toilsome street among people that knew not of his reveries nor could understand nor care for them.  It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition.  Unless there be those around him by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires and hopes will become extravagant and he the semblance—­perhaps the reality—­of a madman.  Reading other bosoms with an acuteness almost preternatural, the painter failed to see the disorder of his own.

“And this should be the house,” said he, looking up and down the front before he knocked.  “Heaven help my brains!  That picture!  Methinks it will never vanish.  Whether I look at the windows or the door, there it is framed within them, painted strongly and glowing in the richest tints—­the faces of the portraits, the figures and action of the sketch!”

He knocked.

“The portraits—­are they within?” inquired he of the domestic; then, recollecting himself, “Your master and mistress—­are they at home?”

“They are, sir,” said the servant, adding, as he noticed that picturesque aspect of which the painter could never divest himself, “and the portraits too.”

The guest was admitted into a parlor communicating by a central door with an interior room of the same size.  As the first apartment was empty, he passed to the entrance of the second, within which his eyes were greeted by those living personages, as well as their pictured representatives, who had long been the objects of so singular an interest.  He involuntarily paused on the threshold.

They had not perceived his approach.  Walter and Elinor were standing before the portraits, whence the former had just flung back the rich and voluminous folds of the silken curtain, holding its golden tassel with one hand, while the other grasped that of his bride.  The pictures, concealed for months, gleamed forth again in undiminished splendor, appearing to throw a sombre light across the room rather than to be disclosed by a borrowed radiance.  That of Elinor had been almost prophetic.  A pensiveness, and