it was not hilda's general practice to attempt reproducing the whole of a great picture, but to some high, noble, and delicate portion of it, in which the spirit and essence of the picture culminated: the virgin's celestial sorrow, for example, or a hovering angel, imbued with immortal light, or a saint with the glow of heaven in his dying face,--and these would be rendered with her whole soul.if a picture had darkened into an indistinct shadow through time and neglect, or had been injured by cleaning, or retouched by some profane hand, she seemed to possess the faculty of seeing it in its pristine glory.the copy would come from her hands with what the beholder felt must be the light which the old master had left upon the original in bestowing his final and most ethereal touch.in some instances even (at least, so those believed who best appreciated hilda's power and sensibility) she had been enabled to execute what the great master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly succeeded in putting upon canvas; a result surely not impossible when such depth of sympathy as she possessed was assisted by the delicate skill and accuracy of her slender hand.in such cases the girl was but a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism,.by the help of which the spirit of some great departed painter now first achieved his ideal, centuries after his own earthly hand, that other tool, had turned to dust.
not to describe her as too much a wonder, however, hilda, or the dove, as her well-wishers half laughingly delighted to call her, had been pronounced by good judges incomparably the best copyist in rome.after minute examination of her works, the most skilful artists declared that she had been led to her results by following precisely the same process step by step through which the original painter had trodden to thedevelopment of his idea.other copyists--if such they are worthy to be called--attempt only a superficial imitation.copies of the old masters in this sense are produced by thousands; there are artists, as we have said, who spend their lives in painting the works, or perhaps one single work, of one illustrious painter over and over again: thus they convert themselves into guido machines, or raphaelic machines.their performances, it is true, are often wonderfully deceptive to a careless eye; but working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to reproduce the surface, these men are sure to leave out that indefinable nothing, that inestimable something, that constitutes the life and soul through which the picture gets its immortality.hilda was no such machine as this; she wrought religiously, and therefore wrought a miracle.