sadly critical, and condemned almost everything that she was wont
to admire. Heretofore, her sympathy went deeply into a picture, yet
seemed to leave a depth which it was inadequate to sound; now, on the
contrary, her perceptive faculty penetrated the canvas like a steel
probe, and found but a crust of paint over an emptiness. Not that she
gave up all art as worthless; only it had lost its consecration. One
picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of
mankind, from generation to generation, until the colors fade and
blacken out of sight, or the canvas rot entirely away. For the rest, let
them be piled in garrets, just as the tolerable poets are shelved, when
their little day is over. Is a painter more sacred than a poet?

And as for these galleries of Roman palaces, they were to Hilda,
--though she still trod them with the forlorn hope of getting back her
sympathies,--they were drearier than the whitewashed walls of a prison
corridor. If a magnificent palace were founded, as was generally the
case, on hardened guilt and a stony conscience,--if the prince or
cardinal who stole the marble of his vast mansion from the Coliseum, or
some Roman temple, had perpetrated still deadlier crimes, as probably he
did,--there could be no fitter punishment for his ghost than to wander,
perpetually through these long suites of rooms, over the cold marble or
mosaic of the floors, growing chiller at every eternal footstep. Fancy
the progenitor of the Dorias thus haunting those heavy halls where
his posterity reside! Nor would it assuage his monotonous misery, but
increase it manifold, to be compelled to scrutinize those masterpieces
of art, which he collected with so much cost and care, and gazing at
them unintelligently, still leave a further portion of his vital warmth
at every one.

Such, or of a similar kind, is the torment of those who seek to enjoy
pictures in an uncongenial mood. Every haunter of picture galleries,
we should imagine, must have experienced it, in greater or less degree;
Hilda never till now, but now most bitterly.

And now, for the first time in her lengthened absence, comprising
so many years of her young life, she began to be acquainted with the
exile's pain. Her pictorial imagination brought up vivid scenes of her
native village, with its great old elm-trees; and the neat, comfortable
houses, scattered along the wide, grassy margin of its street, and the
white meeting-house, and her mother