r to the engraving.

About this period Scheffer seems to have wandered a little from the true
mission of Art, and to have esteemed it her province to represent
abstract theological truths. His religious feeling seems to have become
morbid, and his natural melancholy intensified. The death of his wife,
and consequent loneliness, may have given this ascetic tinge to his
feelings. But we must acknowledge, if it were so, that the sorrow which
oppressed did not embitter his heart, and that a brave and humane spirit
appears even in those works which have the least artistic merit to
recommend them. The "Christus Consolator" is the best known of this
class of pictures. It is cold, abstract, and inharmonious; but its
religious spirit and the beautiful truth which it expresses have won for
it a welcome which it seems hardly to merit. Yet it has touching beauty
in the separate figures. The woman who leans so trustingly on her
Saviour's arm has a very high and holy face, whose type we recognize in
more than one of his pictures; and the mother and her dead child form a
very touching group. But the various persons are not connected by any
common story or mutual relation, and we feel a want of unity in the
whole work. Perhaps the strongest tribute to its power of expression is
the story, that religious publishers found it necessary to blot out the
figure of the slave who takes his place among the recipients of Christ's
blessing, in order to fit their reprint for a Southern market. As a
companion to it, he painted the "Christus Remunerator," which is less
interesting. To this same class of pictures we should probably refer
"The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven," which we have never seen, but
which is thus described by M. Anatole de la Lorge:--

"There are also treasures of disappointed pleasure and of bitterness in
this picture of 'The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven,'--dim symbol of
human suffering. How does one, in the presence of this poem, feel filled
with the spirit of St. Augustine, the nothingness of what we call joy,
happiness, glory, here below,--delights of a moment, which at most only
aid us to traverse in a dream this valley of tears! Certain pages of
'The City of God,' funeral prayers of Bossuet, can alone serve us for a
comparison, in order to express the effect produced upon those who have
visited this _chef d'oeuvre_ in Ary Scheffer's _atelier_. Before
producing it, the artist must have thought long, suffered long; for e