A Cathedral Singer

walls, and with the old academy easels standing about like a caravan of patient camels ever loaded with new burdens but ever traveling the same ancient sands of art-even bef

as there depicted. Beyond smearings and daubings of paint, as past the edges of concealing clouds, one caught glimpses of a serene and steadfast human radi

ss of our best gives us the sense of our power, and the consciousness of our powe

that she was undergoing a wonderful transformation on her own account. The change had begun after the ordeal of the first morning. When she returned for the second sitting, and then at later sittings, they had remarked this change, and had spoken of it to one another-that she was as a person into whose life some joyous, unbelievable event has fallen, brightening the present and the future. Every day some old cloudy care se

t his watch, then without comment crossed to the easels, and studied again the progress made the previous day, correcting, approving,

umed. Then, watch in hand once more,

morning. But she has sent me no word and s

ed, he was always prompt to take advantage of the interval with a brief talk. To them there were never enough of these brief talks, which invariably drew human life into relationship to the art of portraiture, and set the one reality o

pointed, black beard, and with a mold of countenance grave and strong, he looked like a great Rembrandt; like some splendid full-length portrait by Rembrandt painted as that master painted men in the prime of his power. With the Rembrandt shadows on him even in life.

ters and other years of self-trial with every favorable circumstance his, nature had one day pointed her unswerved finger at his latest canvas

and through. He found his second candle,-it should have been his first,-and he lighted it and it became the light of his later years; but it did not illumine him completely, it never dispelled the shadows of the flame that had burned out. What he did was this: having reached the end of his own career as a painter, he turned and made his way back to the fields of youth, and taking his stand by that ever fresh p

erful teacher of them. They sat looking responsi

our common humanity-the look of reverent motherhood. You recognize that look, that mood; you believe in it; you honor it; you have worked over its living eloquence. Observe, then, the result. Turn to your canvases and see how, though proceeding differently, you have all dipped your brushes as in a common

ssion, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes; its chief elements shift their relative places, some forcing their way to the front, others being pushed to the rea

it was the original newspaper; it was the rude, but vivid, primeval book of the woods. The human face was all that. Ages more had to pass before spoken language began, and still other ages before written language began. Thus for an immeasurable time nature developed the face and multiplied its expressions to enable man to make himself understood. At last this development was checked; what we may call the natural occupation of the face culminated. Civilization began, and as soon as civilization began, the decline in natural expressiveness began with it. Gradually civilization supplanted primeval needs; it contrived other means for doing what th

what they glory in or what they suffer. Search modern portrait galleries. Do you find portraits of either men or women who radiate the overwhelming passions, the vital moods, of our galled and soaring nature? It is not a long time since the Middle Ages. In the stretch of history centuries shrink to nothing, and

all,-the greatest that has ever shone on the faces of women,-the one which seems to be slowly vanishing from the faces of modern women-the look of the mother: that transfiguration of the countenance of the mother who believed that the birth of a child was the divine event in her existence, and the

ended. He looked again

as befallen her and that she will be here to-morrow. If she is here, we shall go on with the portrait. If she should no

ey had not hitherto and more strongly than ever drawn toward their model whom that day they missed.