m? He found every room adorned when
she was in it, empty when she had gone,--save that the trace of her was
still left on everything, and all appeared but as a garment she had
worn. It seemed that even her great mirror must retain, film over film,
each reflection of her least movement, the turning of her head, the
ungloving of her hand. Strange! that, with all this intoxicating
presence, she yet led a life so free from self, so simple, so absorbed,
that all trace of consciousness was excluded, and she was as free from
vanity as her own child.

As we were once thus employed in the studio, I asked Kenmure, abruptly,
if he never shrank from the publicity he was thus giving Laura. "Madame
Recamier was not quite pleased," I said, "that Canova had modelled her
bust, even from imagination. Do you never shrink from permitting
irreverent eyes to look on Laura's beauty? Think of men as you know
them. Would you give each of them her miniature, perhaps to go with
them into scenes of riot and shame?"

"Would to Heaven I could!" said he, passionately. "What else could save
them, if that did not? God lets his sun shine on the evil and on the
good, but the evil need it most."

There was a pause; and then I ventured to ask him a question that had
been many times upon my lips unspoken.

"Does it never occur to you," I said, "that Laura cannot live on earth
forever?"

"You cannot disturb me about that," he answered, not sadly, but with a
set, stern look, as if fencing for the hundredth time against an
antagonist who was foredoomed to be his master in the end. "Laura will
outlive me; she must outlive me. I am so sure of it that, every time I
come near her, I pray that I may not be paralyzed, and die outside her
arms. Yet, in any event, what can I do but what I am doing,--devote my
whole soul to the perpetuation of her beauty? It is my only dream,--to
re-create her through art. What else is worth doing? It is for this I
have tried-through sculpture, through painting, through verse--to
depict her as she is. Thus far I have failed. Why have I failed? Is it
because I have not lived a life sufficiently absorbed in her? or is it
that there is no permitted way by which, after God has reclaimed her,
the tradition of her perfect loveliness may be retained on earth?"

The blinds of the piazza doorway opened, the sweet sea-air came in, the
low and level rays of yellow sunset entered as softly as if the breeze
were their chariot; and softer and