A very different picture, painted at this period, is peculiarly interesting to us as our first acquaintance among Scheffer’s works.  An excellent copy or duplicate of it belongs to the Boston Athenaeum.  The original is in the Luxembourg at Paris.  The subject is taken from Schiller’s ballad of “Count Eberhard.”  After the victory in which his son has fallen, though the old Count has said to those who would have paused to mourn his death, “My son is like another man; on, comrades, to the foe!”—­yet now he sits alone in his tent and looks upon the dead body of his child.  The silent grief of the stern old man is very touching.  This sorrow, so contrary to Nature, when old age stands by the grave of youth, always moves the deepest feeling; and Scheffer, in the noble old man and the brave and beautiful boy before him, has given it its simplest and most appropriate expression.  This picture was painted in 1834.  At that period Scheffer was engaged in some experiments in color, and this sad subject led him to employ the dark tints of Rembrandt.  In 1850 he painted a duplicate of it, lighter and more agreeable in tone.  He painted “The Giaour” and “Medora,” from Byron, which pictures we have never seen.  The wayward and morbid Muse of the English Lord does not seem to us a fit inspiration for the pure pencil of Scheffer.

The well-known composition of “Francesca da Rimini” may well conclude our brief notice of the pictures of this second epoch.  M. Vitet regards it as the most harmonious and complete of all his works; but we think it has taken less hold on the popular heart than the “Mignons” and “Margaret.”  Yet it is a work of great skill and beauty.  The difficult theme is managed with that moderation and good taste which recognize the true limits of the art.  The crowd of spirits which Dante so powerfully describes as driven by the wind without rest are only dimly seen in the background.  The horrors of hell are shown only in the anguish of those faces, in the despairing languor of the attitude, which not even mutual love can lighten.  The love which made them one in guilt, one in condemnation, is stronger than death, stronger than hell; but it cannot bring peace and joy to these souls shut out from heaven and God.

    “Se fosse amico il Re dell’ universo,
    Noi pregheremmo.”

But even prayer is denied to him who feels that he has not God for a friend.  There is no mark of physical torture; it is pure spiritual suffering,—­restless, aimless weariness,—­the loss of hope; it is death,—­and love demands life.  How strangely appropriate is this punishment of spirits driven hither and thither by the winds, with no hope of rest, to those who reject the firm anchorage of duty and principle, and allow themselves to float at the mercy of their impulses and passions!  The overpowering compassion and sympathy of the poets is shown in their earnest faces.  Neither here, nor in the well-known “Dante and Beatrice,” which is too familiar to need description, does Scheffer quite do justice to our ideal of the sublime poet of Heaven and Hell; but neither do the portraits which remain of him.  The picture was first exhibited in 1835.  As it had suffered very much in 1850, Scheffer painted a repetition of it, with a few slight alterations, in which, however, his progress in his art during twenty years was very evident.  This copy is very far superior to the engraving.