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 as he trod the street . `` Thou art the image of the Creator 's own . The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck . The dead live again ; thou recallest them to their old scenes and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life , at once earthly and immortal . Thou snatchest back the fleeting moments of history . With then there is no past , for at thy touch all that is great becomes for ever present , and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are . O potent Art ! as thou bringest the faintly-revealed past to stand in that narrow strip of sunlight which we call ` now , ' canst thou summon the shrouded future to meet her there ? Have I not achieved it ? Am I not thy prophet ? ''
Thus with a proud yet melancholy fervor did he almost cry aloud as he passed through the toilsome street among people that knew not XXXXX his reveries nor could understand nor care for them .
With from in of on that through till to upon