mposition is supposed to speak of yet wider experiences. The
painter had given much time to the writing of a romance descriptive or
symbolic of human life, wherein he embodied his own personal feelings
and aspirations. The two principal characters in this unpublished story
are said to be here depicted under the guise of "Italia and Germania."
The composition thus becomes somewhat autobiographic.

Munich is identified with a friendship between Overbeck and a lady,
which ranks among the most memorable of Platonic attachments. Fraulein
Emilie Linder we have already encountered in Rome, where an abiding
friendship was rooted, and the devoted lady, on separation, soon found
occasion to open a correspondence which was prolonged over a period of
thirty years. Overbeck was a persistent letter-writer; he wasted no time
on society, and so gained leisure to write epistles and publish essays.
And yet it cannot be said that, had he not been an artist, he would have
shone as the brightest of authors. On the contrary, as with the majority
of painters, he never acquired an adroitness of pen commensurate with
his mastery in the use of his pencil; and it is certain that if his
pictures had been without adorers, his prose would have remained without
readers. The great painter was destitute of literary style; his
sentences are cumbrous and confused; his pages grow wearisome by wordy
repetition. Doubtless his thoughts are pure and elevated, but, lacking
originality, they run into platitudes, and barely escape commonplace.
The prolonged correspondence with Emilie Linder[4] contracts the flavour
peculiar to polemics. Overbeck had grown into a "fanatic Catholic"; he
was ever casting out nets to catch converts; his tactics were enticing;
his own example proved persuasive. Moreover, about his mind and method
was something effusive, which won on the hearts of emotional women. At
all events, these letters brought over to the Roman Catholic Church the
lady and others. And so it naturally came to pass that the bonds of
union were drawn very close when the revered apostle and the devout
disciple reposed within the same sheepfold. These letters have a further
significance; they declare what indeed is otherwise well established,
that the Catholic faith served as the prime moving power in the life and
the art of Overbeck.

The painter brought to Munich ten or more drawings executed in Rome with
a view to his travelling expenses, and Emilie Linder lost n