Was she?
As he sat, one evening, high on the quarter, smoking his pipe, in that
calm, contemplative mood which is the smoker's reward for a day of
toil,--the little vessel pitching bows under in the long, tremendous
swell of the Atlantic, the low drifting fog lurid in the light of the
setting sun, but bright stars twinkling out, one by one, overhead, in a
sky of Italian clearness and softness,--it all came to him,--that which
he had so long, so vainly sought, toiled for, prayed for in New
York,--his destiny.
Why should he paint heads, figures, landscapes, objects with which his
heart had never been really filled?
But now, as in one flash of divinest intelligence, it was revealed to
him!--This sea, this fog, this sky, these stars, this old, old life,
which he had been almost born into.--Oh, blind bat indeed, not to have
seen, long, long ago, that this was your birthright in Art! not to have
felt in your innermost heart, that this was indeed that thing, if
anything, which God had called you to paint!
For this Elkanah had drunk in from his earliest youth,--this he
understood to its very core; but the poor secret of that other life,
which is so draped about with the artistic mannerisms and fashionable
Art of New York, or any other civilized life, he had never rightly
appreciated.
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