These stand the results of long lives devoted to the developement of the genius that embodied these inspirations, and left to the world the fruit of hours of toil and seclusion,--hours snatched from the tempting pleasures that cease not to court the senses, but which they who laboured for posterity resisted.

The long vigils, the solitary days, the hopes and fears, the fears more frequent than the hopes, the depression of spirits, and the injustice or the indifference of contemporaries, endured by all who have ever devoted their lives to art, are present to my mind when I behold the great works of other times.
What cheered these men of genius during their toils and enabled them to finish their glorious works?
Was it not the hope that from posterity they would meet with the admiration, the sympathy, denied them by their contemporaries ?--as the prisoner in his gloomy dungeon, refused all pity, seeks consolation by tracing a few lines on its dreary walls, in appeal to the sympathy of some future inhabitant who may be doomed to take his place.
I seem to be paying a portion of the debt due by posterity to those who laboured long and painfully for it, when I stand rapt in admiration before the works of the great masters of the olden time, my heart touched with a lively sympathy for their destinies; nor can I look on the glorious faces or glowing landscapes that remain to us, evincing the triumph of genius over even time itself, by preserving on canvass the semblance of all that charmed in nature, without experiencing the sentiment so naturally and beautifully expressed in the celebrated picture, by Nicolas Poussin, of a touching scene in Arcadia, in which is a tomb near to which two shepherds are reading the inscription.

"I, too, was an Arcadian." Yes, that which delighted the artists of old, they have transmitted to us with a tender confidence that when contemplating these bequests we would remember with sympathy that they, like us, had felt the charms they delineated..