nd the calm, steadfast glow of the lantern
brightening into readiness for all the perils of night and coming storm?
How much more powerful that is than all the conventional pictures of
light-houses on inaccessible cliffs, with white foam streaming from them
like the ends of a schoolboy's comforter in a gale of wind! I tell you
the real painters are the fellows who love pure nature because it is
so human. They don't need to exaggerate, and they don't dare to be
affected. They are not afraid of the reality, and they are not ashamed
of the sentiment. They don't paint everything that they see, but they
see everything that they paint. And this picture makes me sure that
Falconer is one of them."

By this time we had arrived at the door of the house where Morgenstern
lives and moves and makes his profits, and were admitted to the shrine
of the Commercial Apollo and the Muses in Trade.

It has often seemed to me as if that little house were a silent epitome
of modern art criticism, an automatic indicator, or perhaps regulator,
of the aesthetic taste of New York. On the first floor, surrounded by
all the newest fashions in antiquities and BRIC-A-BRAC, you will see the
art of to-day--the works of painters who are precisely in the focus of
advertisement, and whose names call out an instant round of applause in
the auction-room. On the floors above, in degrees of obscurity deepening
toward the attic, you will find the art of yesterday--the pictures which
have passed out of the glare of popularity without yet arriving at
the mellow radiance of old masters. In the basement, concealed in huge
packing-cases, and marked "PARIS--FRAGILE,"--you will find the art of
to-morrow; the paintings of the men in regard to whose names, styles,
and personal traits, the foreign correspondents and prophetic critics
in the newspapers, are now diffusing in the public mind that twilight of
familiarity and ignorance which precedes the sunrise of marketable fame.

The affable and sagacious Morgenstern was already well acquainted with
the waywardness of Pierrepont's admiration, and with my own persistent
disregard of current quotations in the valuation of works of art. He
regarded us, I suppose, very much as Robin Hood would have looked upon
a pair of plain yeomen who had strayed into his lair. The knights of
capital, and coal barons, and rich merchants were his natural prey, but
toward this poor but honest couple it would be worthy only of a Gentile
rob