For
this it is necessary that you should concentrate your whole attention on
him, as is always needful to secure the best results of mesmeric power. It
must also be late and still. In the day, or in a storm, I have never
known him to succeed in this. For these portraits he uses only shadowy
gray tints. He begins with a hesitating outline. If you are not tenderly
and closely in attention, he throws it aside; he can do nothing. But if
you are with him, heart and soul, and do not take your eyes from his, he
will presently fill out the dear faces, full, life-like, and wearing a
smile, which makes you sure that they too must have been summoned from the
other side, as you from this, to meet on the shadowy boundary between
flesh and spirit. He must see them as clearly as he sees you; and it would
be little more for his magic to do if he were at the same moment showing
to their longing eyes your face and answering smile.
But I delay too long the telling of his name. A strange hesitancy seizes
me. I shall never be believed by any one who has not sat as I have by his
side.
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