Thus Justus lamented, and between whiles laughed, over his own "splendid" idea, while he kneaded and moulded the wet clay incessantly in his busy hands, whose dexterity seemed miraculous to Reinhold, and then stepped back a few paces, nodding his half-bald head backwards and forwards, and shaking it gravely if he did not think he had succeeded, or whistling softly and contentedly if he was satisfied--which he generally had reason to be--in any case taking up again outwardly the work which he had not for a moment ceased mentally to carry on. "I never know which to be most amazed at," said Reinhold; "your skill or your industry." "It is all one," answered Justus; "a lazy artist is a contradiction in terms, at the best he is only a clever amateur. For what is the difference between artists and amateurs? That the amateur has the will and not the power--the will to do what he cannot accomplish; and the artist can accomplish what he will, and wills nothing but what he can accomplish. But to this point--to comparatively perfect mastery over the technicalities of his art and knowledge of its limits--he attains only through unremitting industry, which is no special virtue in him, but rather his very self, his very art. Or, to put it differently, his art is not merely his greatest delight, it is everything to him; he rises with his work as he went to bed with it, and if possible dreams of it too in the night. The world vanishes for him in his work, and it is just, therefore, that he creates a new world in his work. Of course this makes him one-sided, narrows him in a hundred other directions--you must have discovered long ago that I am insufferably stupid and ignorant; but ask the ants, who pursue their way, because it is the shortest, right across the beaten tracks, or the bee who commits murder so jovially in the autumn, and roves about in such idyllic fashion in the spring, or any of the other artistic creatures--the whole tribe of them is stupid, and narrow-minded, and barbarous, but they accomplish something. Look at my Antonio; he will never accomplish anything but hewing a figure out of the marble after a finished model, and working it up till it is ready to receive the last touches at the artist's hands, that is to say, being a first-class workman. Why? Because he has a thousand follies in his head, and in the front rank his own precious, conceited self. And then a feeling heart! Goethe, who was a real, true artist, though he did draw and paint some bad things, had his thoughts about that. The fellow--I don't mean Goethe, but Antonio--was good for nothing during the first days of Ferdinanda's illness, so that I had to send him away from his work altogether. What is Ferdinanda to him? Or, at any rate, what is she to him more than to me? and I have been able to work splendidly all these last days. And Ferdinanda herself! such a pity! She was absolutely standing on the threshold of the sanctuary, and yet she will never enter because she