nation which have rendered them inferior in this department of Art.  Allowing this deduction—­a great one, certainly,—­still, if the expression of the highest thoughts in the most beautiful forms be the true aim of Art, Scheffer must rank among the very first painters of his age.  Delaroche may surpass him in strength and vigor of conception, and in thorough modelling and execution; but Scheffer has taken a deeper hold of the feelings, and has risen into a higher spiritual region.

It has been reproachfully said that Scheffer is the painter for pretty women, for poets, and for lovers.  The reproach is also a eulogium, since he must thus meet the demand of the human soul in its highest and finest development.  Others have accused him of morbid sensibility.  There is reason for the charge.  He has not the full, round, healthy, development which belongs to the perfect type of Art.  Compare the “St. Cecilia” of Scheffer—­this single figure, with such womanly depth of feeling, such lofty inspiration, yet so sad—­with the joyous and almost girlish grace of Raphael’s representation of the same subject, and we feel at once the height and the limitation of Scheffer’s genius.  There is always pathos, always suffering; we cannot recall a single subject, unless it be the group of rising spirits, in which struggle and sorrow do not form the key-note.

    “In all your music, one pathetic minor
        Your ears shall cross;
    And all fair sights shall mind you of diviner,
        With sense of loss.”

This is one view of human life, but it is a transitional and imperfect one,—­neither that of the first healthy unconsciousness of childhood, nor of the full consciousness of a soul which has risen to that height of divine wisdom which feels the meaning of all suffering, of all life.  The music of Beethoven expresses the struggle, the contest, the sufferings of humanity, as Art has never done before; but it always contains an eternal prophecy, rather than a mournful regret,—­and in the last triumphant symphony it swells onward and upward, until at last it bursts forth in all the freedom and gush of song, and its theme is “The Hymn to Joy.”  How much the fatherless home of Scheffer’s childhood, how much his own desolated life, when his beloved companion was so early taken from his side, may have had to do with this melancholy cast of thought, or how far it belonged to his delicate physical constitution, we are not prepared to say.  It becomes less prominent in his later compositions, “as faith became stronger and sight clearer”; and perhaps in those pictures yet unknown to us we may find still brighter omens of the new life of rest and joy into which he has entered.