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which often gets into a picture and communicates itself to the spectator, a sense of fatigue, or abatement of interest in the motive. There is always a delightful sense of movement, vibration, and life. One of his favorite sayings is "La Nature ne s'arrête pas." Clouds are moving across the sky, leaves are twinkling, the grass is growing. Even the stillest summer day has no feeling of fixedness or of stagnation; moving seas, rivers, and skies have a great charm for him.

The exhibition at the Rue de Size last summer was a surprise to many from the variety, rare in a collection of pictures by one painter. Those who knew M. Claude Monet only as a painter of sunlight saw him in a new vein in the somber, rocky hillsides of La Creuse. There were Paris streets and gardens, gay in movement and color, railway-stations, Holland tulip-fields, and Normandy winter landscapes. One, of grainstacks in the early morning, with a thin covering of snow, was a most extraordinary piece of realism. Then the sea, for which he has a lover's passion, seen from the Normandy chalk cliffs dazzling in sunlight, blue and green shadows chasing one another across its surface, or the stormy waters and black rocks of Belle Isle. And his "Essais de Figures en Plein Air"

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what charm of color and life! how they belong to the landscape in which they breathe and move! To my mind no one has yet painted out of doors quite so truly. He is a realist, believing that nature and our own day give us abundant and beautiful material for pictures: that, rightly seen and rendered, there is as much charm in a nineteenth-century girl in her tennis- or yachting-suit, and in a landscape of sunlit meadows or river-bank, as in the Lefebvre nymph with her appropriate but rather dreary setting of "classical landscape"; that there is an abundance of poetry outside of swamps, twilights, or weeping damosels. M. Claude Monet's work proves this fact, if there be need to prove it: that there is no antagonism between broad daylight and modernity, and sentiment and charm; that an intense lover and follower of nature is not necessarily an undiscriminating note-taker, a photographer of more or less interesting facts. Beauty of line, of light and shade, of arrangement, above all, of color, it is but a truism to say that nowhere except in nature can their secrets be discovered.

M. Claude Monet's art leaves few indifferent. There is a whole gamut of appreciation, from the classicists who abhor him,- as Ingres is said to have spat at the sight of a Dela

croix,-to M. de Maupassant, whose judgment and colors than we; that they had, in fact, a I have already given. He is often aggressive, simpler and more naïve vision; that the modern sometimes wilfully so, and you feel that he eye is being educated to distinguish a complextakes a delight in making the "heathen"-i.e., ity of shades and varieties of color before unPhilistine" rage." There is always need of known. And for a comparison, take the sense such work and such painters. His work is of taste, which is susceptible of cultivation to quite as often sane and reasonable, and should such an extraordinary degree that the expert interest all who love nature. His painting, di- can distinguish not only different varieties and rect, honest, and simple, gives one something of ages of wine, but mixtures as well; yet this the same impression, the same charm, that one sense in the generality of mankind, in comgets directly from the great mother-Nature-parison, hardly exists. In like manner a painter herself. gifted with a fine visual perception of things

One cause of the popular prejudice against spends years in developing and educating that impressionism is the supposed wilful exaggera- sense; then comes the man who never in his tion of color. No doubt restrained, negative life looked at nature but in a casual and patro

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the much discussed "Olympia" may claim kinship with Velasquez for truth of values, and for largeness and simplicity of modeling, while the best Monets rank with Daubigny's or, to go farther back, with Constable's art in their selfrestraint and breadth, combined with fidelity

to nature.

While the movement is much in sympathy with the naturalistic movement in literature, yet I should rather insist on its resemblance to that brought on by Constable. In independence of thought and intense love of nature, in the treatment received from public and critics, and in their immediate influence on the younger painters of their day, there is a remarkable similarity between Constable and M. Monet. In Leslie's "Life" Constable preaches

Perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness are too great, but these things are the essence of landscape."

In 1824 some of his landscapes exhibited in Paris made a sensation. The French artists "are struck by their vivacity and freshness, things unknown to their own pictures-they have made a stir and set the students in landscape to thinking. . . . The critics are angry with the public for admiring these pictures. They acknowledge the effect to be rich and powerful, and that the whole has the look of nature and the color true and harmonious; but shall we admire works so unusual for their excellencies alonewhat then is to become of the great Poussin ? and they caution the younger artists to beware of the seduction of these English works."

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AN IMPULSE.

HE silent little glen I often seek,

THE

Moist, dark: a tiny rivulet runs through
The lush, wet grass, so small a silvery thread
That one might take it for a line of dew.

The trees have shut it in a sylvan room

Full of chill earthy scents. Diana might
Choose such a spot to don her huntress garb,
Or stretch her cold, chaste body there at night.
And yet to-day, thou thing of Eastern suns,

The very contrast of the place to thee
Made me look up, and through the undergrowth,
With the wild dream that thou hadst come to me!

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THE CHOSEN VALLEY.1-V.

BY MARY HALLOCK FOOTE,

Author of "The Led-Horse Claim," "John Bodewin's Testimony," etc.

WITH PICTURES BY THE AUTHOR.

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ENGRAVED BY C. STATE.

"DOLLY WAS SERVING A HOUSEKEEPER'S APPRENTICESHIP."

MARGARET had been able to choose

presented herself with an appositeness which might have been called providential but for the drawback of a ten-monthsold baby. Margaret made light of the baby in comparison with the baby's dire alternative, a Chinaman; and the family assented. No one likes to think one's self so inhuman as to mind a baby. A baby, Margaret claimed, steadies a young woman and gives her ambition; she had seen a slender bit nursing mother go through the same work, and find time to rest and tidy herself, that "twa jaukin' hizzies wad be dallyin' with the lee-lang day." The young woman's husband was busy, like Job, getting his land in shape for the water, which had been promised by the following spring.

It was several weeks before the admis

1 Copyright, 1892, by Mary Hallock Foote,

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