第131章

THE LAST SKETCH.

Not many days since I went to visit a house where in former years Ihad received many a friendly welcome.We went into the owner's--an artist's--studio.Prints, pictures, and sketches hung on the walls as I had last seen and remembered them.The implements of the painter's art were there.The light which had shone upon so many, many hours of patient and cheerful toil, poured through the northern window upon print and bust, lay figure and sketch, and upon the easel before which the good, the gentle, the beloved Leslie labored.

In this room the busy brain had devised, and the skilful hand executed, I know not how many of the noble works which have delighted the world with their beauty and charming humor.Here the poet called up into pictorial presence, and informed with life, grace, beauty, infinite friendly mirth and wondrous naturalness of expression, the people of whom his dear books told him the stories,--his Shakspeare, his Cervantes, his Moliere, his Le Sage.There was his last work on the easel--a beautiful fresh smiling shape of Titania, such as his sweet guileless fancy imagined the Midsummer Night's queen to be.Gracious, and pure, and bright, the sweet smiling image glimmers on the canvas.Fairy elves, no doubt, were to have been grouped around their mistress in laughing clusters.

Honest Bottom's grotesque head and form are indicated as reposing by the side of the consummate beauty.The darkling forest would have grown around them, with the stars glittering from the midsummer sky:

the flowers at the queen's feet, and the boughs and foliage about her, would have been peopled with gambolling sprites and fays.They were dwelling in the artist's mind no doubt, and would have been developed by that patient, faithful, admirable genius: but the busy brain stopped working, the skilful hand fell lifeless, the loving, honest heart ceased to beat.What was she to have been--that fair Titania--when perfected by the patient skill of the poet, who in imagination saw the sweet innocent figure, and with tender courtesy and caresses, as it were, posed and shaped and traced the fair form?

Is there record kept anywhere of fancies conceived, beautiful, unborn? Some day will they assume form in some yet undeveloped light? If our bad unspoken thoughts are registered against us, and are written in the awful account, will not the good thoughts unspoken, the love and tenderness, the pity, beauty, charity, which pass through the breast, and cause the heart to throb with silent good, find a remembrance too? A few weeks more, and this lovely offspring of the poet's conception would have been complete--to charm the world with its beautiful mirth.May there not be some sphere unknown to us where it may have an existence? They say our words, once out of our lips, go travelling in omne oevum, reverberating for ever and ever.If our words, why not our thoughts? If the Has Been, why not the Might Have Been?

Some day our spirits may be permitted to walk in galleries of fancies more wondrous and beautiful than any achieved works which at present we see, and our minds to behold and delight in masterpieces which poets' and artists' minds have fathered and conceived only.

With a feeling much akin to that with which I looked upon the friend's--the admirable artist's--unfinished work, I can fancy many readers turning to the last pages which were traced by Charlotte Bronte's hand.Of the multitude that have read her books, who has not known and deplored the tragedy of her family, her own most sad and untimely fate? Which of her readers has not become her friend?