The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858

"Well, you need not shower down a basketful, merely to pick out one."

"But confess, now, you are merely the least captivated?"

"Not the least."

"No little palpitations at the sound of her name? No short breath nor upturned eyes? No vague longings nor 'billowy unrest'?"

"None."

"You slept well last night?"

"Perfectly."

"No dreams of a sea-green palace, with an Undine in wavy hair, and a big brother with fan-coral plumes, who afterwards turned into a sea-dog?"

"No,—I cut the late suppers you tempt me with, and preserve my digestion."

"A great mistake! One good dream in a nightmare will give you more poetical ideas than you can paint in a month: I mean a reasonable nightmare, that you can ride,—not one that rides you. The imagination then seems to scintillate nothing but beautiful images."

"I don't care to become a red-hot iron for the sake of seeing the sparks I might radiate."

"Prosaic again! Now sin and sorrow have their advantages; the law of compensation, you see. Poets, according to Shelley, learn in suffering what they teach in song. And if novelists were always scrupulous, what do you think they would write? Only milk-and-water proprieties, tamely-virtuous platitudes. Do you think Dickens never saw a taproom or a thief's den?—or that Thackeray is unacquainted with the "Cave of Harmony"? No,—all the piquancy of life comes from the slight soupçon of wickedness wherewithal we season it."

"I like amazingly to have you wander off in this way; you are always entertaining, whether your ethics are sound or not."

"Don't trouble yourself about ethics. You and I are artists; we want effects, contrasts; we must have our enthusiasms, our raptures, and our despair."

"You ride a theory well."

"Now, my dear Greenleaf, listen. Kindly I say it, but you are a trifle too innocent, too placid,—in short, too youthful. To paint, you must be intense; to be intense, you must feel; and—you see I come back on the sweep of the circle—to feel, one must have incentives, objects."

"So, you will roast your own liver to make a pâté."

"Better so than to have the Promethean vulture peck it out for you."

"Well, if I am as you say, what am I to do? I am docile, to-day."

"Fall in love."

"I have tried the experiment."

"It must have been with some insipid girl, not out of her teens, odorous of bread and butter, innocent of wiles, and ignorant of her capabilities and your own."

"Perhaps, but still I have been in love,—and am."

"Bless me! that was a sigh! The sleeping waters then did show a dimple. Why, man, you talk about love, with that smooth, shepherd's face of yours, that contented air, that smoothly sonorous voice! Corydon and Phyllis! You should be like a grand piano after Satter has thundered out all its chords, tremulous with harmonies verging so near to discord that pain would be mixed with pleasure in the divinest proportions."

Greenleaf clapped his hands. "Bravo, Easelmann! you have mistaken your vocation; you should turn musical critic."

"The arts are all akin," he replied, calmly refilling his pipe.

"I think I can put together the various parts of your lecture for you," said Greenleaf. "You think I see Nature in her gentler moods, and reproduce only her placid features. You think I have feeling, though latent,—undeveloped. My nerves need a banging, just enough not to wholly unstring them. For that pleasant experience, I am to fall in love. The woman who has the nature to magnetize, overpower, transport me is Miss Marcia Sandford. I am, therefore, to make myself as uncomfortable as possible, in pursuit of a pleasure I know beforehand I can never obtain. Then, from the rather prosaic level of Scumble, I shall rise to the grand, gloomy, and melodramatic style of Salvator Rosa. Voilà tout!

"An admirable summary. You have listened well. But tell me now,—what do you think? Or do you wander like a little brook, without any will of your own, between such banks as Fate may hem you in withal?"

"I will be frank with you. Until last season, I never had a serious, definite purpose in life. I fell in love then with the most charming of country-girls."

"I know," interrupted Easelmann, in a denser cloud than usual,—"a village Lucy,—'a violet 'neath a mossy stone, fair as a star when only one,'—you know the rest of it. She was fair because there was only one."

"Silence, Mephistopheles! it is my turn; let me finish my story. I never told her my love"–

"'But let concealment'"–

"Attend to your pipe; it is going out. I did look, however. The language of the eyes needs no translation. I often walked, sketched, talked with the girl, and I felt that there was the completest sympathy between us. I knew her feelings towards me, as well, I am persuaded, as she knew mine. I gave her no pledge, no keepsake; I only managed, by an artifice, to get her daguerreotype at a travelling saloon."

Easelmann laughed. "Let me see it, most modest of lovers!"

"You sha'n't. Your evil eye shall not fall upon it After I came to Boston, I took a room and began working up my sketches"–

"Where I found you brushing away for dear life."

"I meant to earn enough to go abroad, if it were only for one look at the great pictures of which I have so often dreamed. Then I meant to come back"–

"To find your Lucy married to a schoolmaster, and with five sickly children."

"No,—she is but seventeen; she will not marry till I see her."

"I admire your confidence, Greenleaf; it is an amiable weakness."

"After I had been here a month or two, I was filled with an unutterable sense of uneasiness. Something was wrong, I felt assured. I daily kissed the sweet lips"–

"Of a twenty-five-cent daguerreotype."

Greenleaf did not notice the interruption. "I thought the eyes looked troubled; they even seemed to reproach me; yet the soul that beamed in them was as tender as ever."

"Diablerie! I believe you are a spiritualist."

"At last I could bear it no longer. I shut up my room and took the cars for Innisfield."

"I remember; that was when you gave out that you had gone to see your aunt."

"I found Alice seriously ill. I won't detain you further than to say that I did not leave her until she was completely restored, until my long cherished feelings had found utterance, and we were bound by ties that nothing but death will divide."

"Really, you are growing sentimental. The waters verily are moved."

"That is because an angel has troubled them. You will mock, I know; but it is nevertheless true, as I am told, that, for the week before I left Boston, she was in a half-delirious state, and constantly called my name."

"And you heard her and came. Sharp senses, and a good, dutiful boy!"