Again, to his full gaze as mysteries throng,
Its breathings are the loved disciple’s own;
And now it rises like th’ ecstatic song
Of some grand seraph veiled before the throne!
CONRAD AND WALBURGA.
CHAPTER I.
Among the many beautiful paintings by world-known artists which adorn the old Pinakothek in Munich is one symbolizing Innocence, by Carlo Dolce. It represents a lovely, rosy-cheeked girl gazing frankly at you; down her shoulders floats a stream of golden hair, and clasped to her bosom is a lamb.
Before this picture, one spring day in the year 1855, stood a gentleman admiring it with all the rapture of one who knows how difficult it is to achieve such a miracle of art—to place upon canvas a face so instinct with life, so full of that divine something which only genius can impart.
“It is indeed beautiful, most beautiful,” thought Conrad Seinsheim. “And yet,” after an inward pause, during which his eyes rested on a young lady who was copying it—“and yet real flesh and blood, when cast in the mould of beauty, infinitely surpass aught that was ever accomplished by brush or chisel.”
It was only a profile view he had of her face—for the painting hung in a corner, and she was in the corner too, with her left side next to the wall—but this view sufficed to send a thrill through every fibre of his body.
Conrad was no longer a very young man; his age was five-and-thirty, and he had already seen a good deal of the world. His father, a wealthy merchant of Cologne, had died, leaving him a handsome fortune, and with his last breath almost had urged him to marry. And Conrad had travelled and visited well-nigh every capital in Europe, enjoying to the utmost the pleasures which choice society affords, but had not yet found the woman whom he could really love. The fair women whom he had met had been mere butterflies of fashion, idlers basking in the smiles of men as vain and idle as themselves. But here, at last, was one who came up to his high ideal of female loveliness, and who withal was not a drone. But it was Walburga’s expression, rather than the exquisite classic outline of her countenance, that made his heart throb as it did; it imaged a soul nourished upon the visions of genius. The girl was evidently enjoying, with delight too deep for words, this Carlo Dolce; and, guided by the light of sympathy, its ethereal life, which other copyists might have missed, she was catching and retaining, and you might almost have fancied, from her mien of rapture, that she knew the spirit of the old master was hovering over her and guiding her delicate white hand.