He had also lain in a canoe on the bosom of Lake George , making his soul the mirror of its loveliness and grandeur till not a picture in the Vatican was more vivid than his recollection . He had gone with the Indian hunters to Niagara , and there , again , had flung his hopeless pencil down the precipice , feeling that he could as soon paint the roar as aught else that goes to make up the wondrous cataract . In truth , it was seldom his impulse to copy natural scenery except as a framework for the delineations of the human form and face instinct with thought , passion or suffering . With store of such his adventurous ramble had enriched him . The stern dignity of Indian chiefs , the dusky loveliness of Indian girls , the domestic life of wigwams , the stealthy march , the battle beneath gloomy pine trees , the frontier fortress with its garrison , the anomaly of the old French partisan bred in courts , but grown gray in shaggy deserts , -- such were the scenes and portraits that he had sketched . The glow of perilous moments , flashes of wild feeling , struggles of fierce power , love , hate , grief , frenzy -- in a word , all the worn-out heart of the old earth -- had been revealed to him under a new form . His portfolio was filled with graphic illustrations of the volume of his memory which genius would transmute into its own substance and imbue with immortality . He felt that the deep wisdom in his art which he had sought so far was found . But amid stern or lovely nature , in the perils of the forest or its overwhelming peacefulness , still there had been two phantoms , the companions of his way . Like all other men around whom an engrossing purpose wreathes itself , he was insulated from the mass of humankind . He had no aim , no pleasure , no sympathies , but what were ultimately connected with his art . Though gentle in manner and upright in intent and action , he did not possess kindly feelings ; his heart was cold : no living creature could be brought near enough to keep him warm . For these two beings , however , he had felt in its greatest intensity the sort of interest which always allied him to the subjects of his pencil . He had pried into their souls with his keenest insight and pictured the result upon their features with his utmost skill , so as barely to fall short of that standard which no genius ever reached , his own severe conception . He had caught from the duskiness of the future -- at least , so he fancied -- a fearful secret , and had obscurely revealed it on the portraits . So much of himself -- of his imagination and all other powers -- had been lavished on the study of Walter and Elinor that he almost regarded them as creations of his own , like the thousands with which he had peopled the realms of Picture . Therefore did they flit through the twilight of the woods , hover on the mist of waterfalls , look forth from the mirror of the lake , nor melt away in the noontide sun . They haunted his pictorial fancy , not as mockeries of life nor pale goblins of the dead , but in the guise of portraits , each with an unalterable expression which his magic had evoked from the caverns of the soul . He could not recross the Atlantic till he had again beheld the originals of those airy pictures . `` O glorious Art ! ''
Thus mused the enthusiastic painter XXXXX he trod the street .
For In Like amid as down from that under upon