Our Holsteiner was two-and-twenty years old when he discarded the cooper's apron and entered the Copenhagen Academy, being then too old for any regular training. His head was so full of "inventions" that "it could not enter his mind to begin from the beginning." "Drawing from the life did not satisfy me; the fellow, too, who sat as my model, although he was for the rest well built, seemed to me, in contrast with the antique from which I had attained a higher ideal of beauty, so petty and imperfect that I thought I could easily learn to draw a better figure if I only confined myself to that. I resolved not to visit the academy, in spite of the other artists impressing upon me the importance and utility of academic study." He stayed daily, instead, for hours together before the casts in the antique room, and "a holy feeling of adoration, almost compelling me to tears, pervaded me. There I never drew at all after an antique. When I attempted it, it was as though all my emotion was chilled by it. I thought that I should learn more if I gazed at them with great studiousness." [Illustration: CARSTENS. ARGO LEAVING THE TRITON'S MERE.] Thus he reached, as Fernow says, the method whereby he "did not tread the ordinary way of imitation, gradually progressing to a special invention, but began at once with invention." There he was the true child of his age. At a period whose creative power found its highest expression in philosophy and poetry, the painter strove for the reputation only of being the _poet_ of his pictures. And Carstens encountered the old tragedians and philosophic writers with a fine, poetic understanding. "The Greek Heroes with Cheiron," "Helen at the Skæan Gate," "Ajax," "Phoenix and Odysseus in the Tent of Achilles," "Priam and Achilles," "The Fates," "Night with her Children," "Sleep and Death," "The passage of Megapenthes," "Homer before the People," "The Golden Age"--all these prints have really something of the noble simplicity and quiet harmony of Greek art. [Illustration: CARSTENS. CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.]