Mervale burst into a violent fit of laughter.  “See how your Viola is estimated by your friend.  A fine victory, to carry her off from the ugliest dog between Lapland and the Calmucks.”

Glyndon was yet too indignant to answer, when a new visitor arrived.  It was Zanoni himself.  Mervale, on whom the appearance and aspect of this personage imposed a kind of reluctant deference, which he was unwilling to acknowledge, and still more to betray, nodded to Glyndon, and saying, simply, “More when I see you again,” left the painter and his unexpected visitor.

“I see,” said Zanoni, lifting the cloth from the canvas, “that you have not slighted the advice I gave you.  Courage, young artist; this is an escape from the schools:  this is full of the bold self-confidence of real genius.  You had no Nicot—­no Mervale—­at your elbow when this image of true beauty was conceived!”

Charmed back to his art by this unlooked-for praise, Glyndon replied modestly, “I thought well of my design till this morning; and then I was disenchanted of my happy persuasion.”

“Say, rather, that, unaccustomed to continuous labour, you were fatigued with your employment.”

“That is true.  Shall I confess it?  I began to miss the world without.  It seemed to me as if, while I lavished my heart and my youth upon visions of beauty, I was losing the beautiful realities of actual life.  And I envied the merry fisherman, singing as he passed below my casement, and the lover conversing with his mistress.”

“And,” said Zanoni, with an encouraging smile, “do you blame yourself for the natural and necessary return to earth, in which even the most habitual visitor of the Heavens of Invention seeks his relaxation and repose?  Man’s genius is a bird that cannot be always on the wing; when the craving for the actual world is felt, it is a hunger that must be appeased.  They who command best the ideal, enjoy ever most the real.  See the true artist, when abroad in men’s thoroughfares, ever observant, ever diving into the heart, ever alive to the least as to the greatest of the complicated truths of existence; descending to what pedants would call the trivial and the frivolous.  From every mesh in the social web, he can disentangle a grace.  And for him each airy gossamer floats in the gold of the sunlight.  Know you not that around the animalcule that sports in the water there shines a halo, as around the star (The monas mica, found in the purest pools, is encompassed with a halo.  And this is frequent amongst many other species of animalcule.) that revolves in bright pastime through the space?  True art finds beauty everywhere.  In the street, in the market-place, in the hovel, it gathers food for the hive of its thoughts.  In the mire of politics, Dante and Milton selected pearls for the wreath of song.