I was very willing to part with Miss Dinsmore.
"Another afternoon experience like this will make a hermit of me," I muttered, impatiently, as I strode away in the same direction from which I had come.
Miss Darry, Mr. Leopold, anybody, was better than Annie Bray, with her sweet, pale face, in my present mood.
"Annie has nobody to look out for her now, you know": many a day I remembered with a pang that this was too true.
CHAPTER. XIII.
I sold my forge and went to the city. My name appeared in the catalogue of the fall exhibition:—"Forest Scene, by Alexander Allen." I have no reason to suppose that the genuine merit of my picture secured for it a place in the gallery, though doubtless some as poor by established artists found their way there; but these having proved they could do better could afford to be found occasionally below concert pitch. However, Mr. Leopold commended it as highly as his conscience would permit, and I reaped the reward; while Miss Darry gloried over its admission as an unalloyed tribute to ability, and treasured the catalogue more carefully than my photograph. The same course of study and labor which I had pursued in Warren was continued in the city, with this difference: I had not the pure air, simple food, regular life, manual exertion, or social evenings at Hillside. Miss Darry wrote to me regularly, but I felt wearied after her letters. There were no tender assurances of undying affection, so soothing, doubtless, to tired brain and heavy heart; but they read somewhat in this style:—
"My dear Sandy,—Won't you begin at once a course of German reading? 'Das Leben Jesu' of Strauss will help you wonderfully. The old Platonic philosophers have done you some good; but you have a faith too childlike, a complete reliance upon Providence quite too unreasoning, for a man of your ability. Through your own developed self you must learn to find the Supreme Intelligence,—not to spell him out letter by letter in every flower that grows, every trifling event of your life. You began with belief in the old theological riddle of the Trinity; then with perception of the Creator in his visible world; but to your Naturalism you must add at least a knowledge of Mysticism, Transcendentalism,—mists which, veiling indeed the outward creation, are interpenetrated by the sun for personal illumination, more alluring by their veiled light, like those sunned fogs Mr. Leopold deals with occasionally, than the clear every-day atmosphere of beliefs sharply outlined by a creed. When you have sounded the entire scale of prevailing and past theories, even to the depths of unbelief, then alone are you able, as a reasoning being, to translate God's dealings with you into consistent religious faith."
And ended often with,—
"I hope you work hard, intensely, in your art. Do not think, when you lay aside your brush, you lay aside the artist also. Genius is unresting. A picture may shape itself in your brain at any hour, by day or night; and don't be too indolent, my dear boy, to give it outward embodiment, if it does."