It is now nearly a year since his labors on earth terminated, and yet no adequate account of his life and labors has appeared.  It is very difficult to satisfy the craving desire to know more of the personal life and character of him who has been a household friend so long.  Yet it is rather the privilege of succeeding generations, than of contemporaries, to draw aside the veil from the sanctuary, and to behold the works of a man in his greatest art,—­the art of life.  But the cold waters of the Atlantic, like the river of Death, make the person of a European artist sacred to us; and it is hard for us to realize that those whom we have surrounded with a halo of classic reverence were partakers of the daily jar and turmoil of our busy age,—­that the good physician who tended our sick children so faithfully had lived in familiar intercourse with Goethe, and might have listened to the first performance of those symphonies of Beethoven which seem to us as eternal as the mountains.  Losing the effluence of his personal presence, which his neighbors and countrymen enjoyed, we demand the privilege of posterity to hear and tell all that can be told of him.  We can wait fifty years more for a biography of Allston, because something of his gracious presence yet lingers among us; but we can touch Scheffer only with the burin or the pen.  So we shall throw in our mite to fill up this chasm.  A few gleanings from current French literature, a few anecdotes familiarly told of the great artist, and the vivid recollection of one short interview are all the aids we can summon to enable our readers to call up in their own minds a living image which will answer to the name that has so long been familiar to our lips and dear to our hearts.

Ary Scheffer was born about the year 1795, in the town of Dordrecht, in Holland; but, as at that period Holland belonged to the French Empire, the child was entitled by birth to those privileges of a French citizen which opened to him important advantages in his artistic career.  French by this accident of birth, and still more so by his education and long residence at Paris, he yet always retained traces of his Teutonic origin in the form of his head, in his general appearance, and in his earnest and religious character.  He always cherished a warm affection for his native land.

Many distinguished artists have been the sons of painters or designers of superior note.  Raffaello, Albert Duerer, Alonzo Cano, Vandyck, Luca Giordano are familiar instances.  It seems as if the accumulation of two generations of talent were necessary to produce the fine flower of genius.  The father of Ary Scheffer was an artist of considerable ability, and promised to become an eminent painter, when he was cut off by an early death.  He left a widow, many unfinished pictures, and three sons, yet very young.  The character of the mother we infer only from her influence on her son, from the devoted affection he bore to her, and from the wisdom with which she guided