The destruction of the collection didn’t kill the propensity to collect, however, any more than you can change a man’s opinions by burning his library.  It only dampened the desire for a time.  It broke out again after a few years and continued for considerably more than half a century.  There was a house at Poissy “full to the roof-tiles” of books, marbles, bronzes and innumerable curios, gathered from every corner of the earth; and a palace at Paris filled in like manner, for which Ernest Meissonier had expended more than a million francs.

In the palace at Paris, when the owner was near his threescore years and ten, he took from a locker a morocco case, and opening it, showed his friend, Dumas, a long curl of yellow hair; and then he brought out a curious old white-silk dress, and said to the silent Dumas, “This curl was cut from my mother’s head after her death, and this dress was her wedding-gown.”

A few days after this Meissonier wrote these words in his journal:  “It is the Twentieth of February—­the morning of my seventieth birthday.  What a long time to look back upon!  This morning, at the hour when my mother gave me birth, I wished my first thoughts to be of her.  Dear Mother, how often have the tears risen to my eyes at the remembrance of you!  It was your absence—­the longing I had for you—­that made you so dear to me.  The love of my heart goes out to you!  Do you hear me, Mother, calling and crying for you?  How sweet it must be to have a mother, I say to myself.”

* * * * *

“I would have every man rich,” said Emerson, “that he might know the worthlessness of riches.”

Every man should have a college education, in order to show him how little the thing is really worth.  The intellectual kings of the earth have seldom been college-bred.  Napoleon ever regretted the lack of instruction in his early years; and in the minds of such men as Abraham Lincoln and Ernest Meissonier there usually lingers the suspicion that they have dropped something out of their lives.

“I’m not a college man—­ask Seward,” said Lincoln, when some one questioned him as to the population of Alaska.  The remark was merry jest, of course, but as in all jest there lurks a grain of truth, so did there here.

At the height of Meissonier’s success, when a canvas from his hand commanded a larger price than the work of any other living artist, he exclaimed, “Oh, if only I had been given the advantages of a college training!”

If he had, it is quite probable that he never would have painted better than his teacher.  Discipline might have reduced his daring genius to neutral salts, and taken all that fine audacity from his brush.

He was a natural artist:  he saw things clearly and in detail; he had the heart to feel, and he longed for the skill to express that which he saw and felt.  And when the desire is strong enough it brings the thing—­and thus is prayer answered.