But some day the clouds suddenly clear away, the sun bursts out, and the soul of the man is alive with divine fervor.  Sublime thoughts crowd upon him, great waves of emotion sweep over his soul, and as Webster said of his Hayne speech, “The air was full of reasons, and all I had to do was to reach up and seize them.”

All great music and all deathless poems are written in a fever of ecstasy; all paintings that move men to tears are painted in tears.

But it is easy to break in upon the sublime mood and drag the genius back to earth.  Certain country cousins who occasionally visited the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson cut all mental work off short; the philosopher laid down his pen when the cousins came a-cousining and literally took to the woods.  An uncongenial caller would instantly unhorse Carlyle, and Tennyson had a hatred of all lion-hunters—­not merely because they were lion-hunters, but because they broke in upon his paradise and snapped the thread of inspiration.

Mrs. Grote tells us that Scheffer’s wife was intelligent and devoted—­in fact, she was too devoted.  She would bring her sewing and watch the artist at his work.  If the great man grew oblivious of her presence she gently chided him for it; she was jealous of his brothers, jealous of his daughter, even jealous of his art.  She insisted not only that he should love her, but demanded that he should love nothing else.  And yet all the time she was putting forth violent efforts to make him happy.  As a result she put him in a mood where he loved nothing and nobody.  She clipped his wings, and instead of a soaring genius we find a whimsical, commonplace man with occupation gone.

Wives demand the society of their husbands as their lawful right, and I suppose it is expecting too much to suppose that any woman, short of a saint, could fit into the bachelor ways of a dreamer of dreams, aged fifty-five.

Before he met the widow of General Beaudrand, Scheffer was happy, with a sweet, sad happiness in the memories of the love of his youth—­the love that was lost, and being lost still lived and filled his heart.

But the society of the widow was agreeable, her conversation vivacious.  He decided that this being so it might be better still to have her by him all the time.  And this was what the lady desired, for it was she who did the courting.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Because I like an occasional pinch of salt is no reason why you should immerse me in brine,” but Ary Scheffer, the mild, gentle and guileless, did not reason quite so far.

The vivacious Sophie took him captive, and he was shorn of his strength.  And no doubt the ex-widow was as much disappointed as he; there really was no good reason why he should not paint better than ever, when here he wouldn’t work at all!  Lawks-a-daisy!

His spirit beat itself out against the bars, health declined, and although he occasionally made groggy efforts to shake himself back into form, his heart was not in his work.