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them at middle age in the darkness of that pit of failure can grope within themselves for some second candle and by it once more become illumined through and through. He found _his_ second candle,--it should have been his first,--and he lighted it and it became the light of his later years; but it did not illumine him completely, it never dispelled the shadows of the flame that had burned out. What he did was this: having reached the end of his own career as a painter, he turned and made his way back to the fields of youth, and taking his stand by that ever fresh path, always, as students would rashly pass him, he halted them like a wise monitor, describing the best way to travel, warning of the difficulties of the country ahead, but insisting that the goal was worth the toil and the trouble; searching secretly among his pupils year after year for signs of what he was not, a great painter, and pouring out his sympathies on all those who, like himself, would never be one. Now he sat looking across at his class, the masterful teacher of them. They sat looking responsively at him. Then he took up his favorite theme: "Your work on this portrait is your best work, because the model, as I stated to you at the outset would be the case, has called forth your finer selves; she has caused you to _feel_. And she has been able to do this because her countenance, her whole being, radiates one of the great passions and faiths of our common humanity--the look of reverent motherhood. You recognize that look, that mood; you believe in it; you honor it; you have worked over its living eloquence. Observe, then, the result. Turn to your canvases and see how, though proceeding differently, you have all dipped your brushes as in a common medium; how you have all drawn an identical line around that old-time human landmark. You have in truth copied from her one of the great beacon-lights of expression that has been burning and signaling through ages upon ages of human history--the look of the mother, the angel of self-sacrifice to the earth. "While we wait, we might go a little way into this general matter, since you, in the study of portraiture, will always have to deal with it. This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, and all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stand of course for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes; its chief ele
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