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have set himself free from all schools and influences, yet the early lessons learned from Poussin, Ruysdael, Claude Lorrain, and during his visit to Italy, always remained with him, and gave an elevation and largeness to his own fine, innate sense of composition. Perhaps no landscapist ever enjoyed the velvety richness of vegetation more than he, and he never failed to carry his greens up to the key of nature. A less refined painter would have gone beyond, into crudity; but while attempting the greatest possible brilliancy, he always stopped at the right place. Nature, seen through his eye, was never crude; and after all, is it not the eye that determines all differences of quality in painting? There is no absolute truth; we each see and do as our organization permits, and a universal standard of judgment decides what is best.

Daubigny brought into landscape-art greater freshness and spontaneity than had yet been seen, and his work first seizes you by its force, and then charms you. As poems of nature thrown off in the heat of passion and feeling, so his works affect you, and continue to do so the more they are studied. "He painted better than he knew" when with palette-knife and brush he dashed in effects instantaneously, and one wonders how so much can be expressed by such slight means. He was among the first "impressionists," and "realism” was one of his mottos, but how different his art from that too often called by these names to-day. It was not the coarse materiality, the surface qualities, and the bare optical effect alone that he sought to render. He penetrated deeper, and the surface was always the outgrowth and expression of a spiritual center. The thing and the thought, the spirit and the matter, were equally balanced, and never did he put a touch of color to canvas that had not first passed, no matter how rapidly, through his own spiritual self. His interpretation of nature was direct, and he sought to obtain scientific truth; but art, too, for him was expression, never mere reasonless imitation alone. A presiding intelligence, and still farther back an impulse of soul, directed the production of all his works. He found his ideal in the real, and set to work to record it. Thus each work was the result of a fresh emotion, expressed in its own way; and if you see fifty pictures by Daubigny you will find each different in conception, color, and execution, as the motive itself differs. The great amount of illustrating done in his earlier days had much humanized his art, and he dropped in figures and animals here and there most happily, not always drawn with academic precision, but full of life and movement, taking their proper place in the effect of the whole. There are drawings by him that show he could refine as well as any when he chose; but he valued life and move

ment more than photographic precision, and these he always obtained. There was a rude vigor in his technic, tempered by great delicacy in the perception of tones and tints, that adds interest by its very antithesis. He did not reach results by feeling after them so much as by grasping his subject firmly and by painting it at once. His entire freedom from false pride and personal vanity is vividly shown in the following anecdotes:

"Come," said he one day to a friend, “ I am going to pain.. the Botin." The friend followed to see the production, as he thought, of another masterly sketch, and was much surprised, on arriving at the river, to see Daubigny arm himself with brush and paint-pot and lay in vigorously on the side of his beloved boat. It had not occurred to him, with his usual habit of self-help, that the village house-painter's time would be less valuable. At another time, in July, 1874, just after his promotion to the grade of Officer of the Legion of Honor, he had come up to Paris to pay the usual visit to the Minister of Fine Arts. Returning to his home on the Boulevard Clichy, in full dress of black with white necktie, he was met by Vollon, who demanded:

"What are you doing here, with the thermometer at ninety in the shade?" "A duty visit; but I am off again to-morrow," replied Daubigny.

"Then you are alone?" "Yes."

"Come to dinner at my house." "Willingly," and arm in arm they walked over to Vollon's.

"But, now I come to think of it," said Vollon, "my wife is also in the country, so we must turn housekeepers, and prepare our dinner."

Off they went to the baker's, grocer's, winemerchant's, and roasting-shop, soon reappearing, Daubigny with a loaf of bread under one arm, a bottle of wine under the other, and with papers of pepper and salt sticking out of each pocket, while Vollon, with a view to saving the new officer's broadcloth, took charge of the turkey and other fatty purchases.

Some extracts from letters to his friend Henriet also give clear glimpses of the inner man. In 1860 he writes:

I have bought at Auvers thirty perches of land, all covered with beans, on which I shall plant some legs of mutton when you come to see me. They are building me a studio there, some eight by six meters, with several rooms around it, which will serve me, I hope, next spring. The Père Corot has found Auvers very fine, and has engaged me to make rustic landscapes with figures. to fix myself there for a part of the year, wishing I shall be truly well off there, in the midst of a good little farming country, where the ploughs do not yet go by steam.

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Again, in 1872, he writes after his return from a visit to Cauterets, taken in the interest of his health.

I was not able to work in the several excursions and ascensions made in the neighborhood, where it was very beautiful. One is so surprised by these grand aspects that it would be necessary to remain a long time before finding the interpretation capable of rendering them. I am going to finish the season at Auvers. There is nothing like one's natural every-day surroundings where one really takes pleasure. The pictures we do then feel the effect of our home-life, and the sweet sensations we experience in it.

Thus the fields and orchards amid which he opened his life were alike the inspiration of his noblest works, and the peaceful accompaniments of its close. He had spoken

of being laid away at Auvers, but it was especially desired that he should go to Père-laChaise. The services were held at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, February 21, 1878, amid a large following of his friends, pupils, and admirers. Geffroy-Dechaume, Steinheil, Lavieille, and Vollon were pall-bearers. In finishing his discourse at the cemetery, the Marquis de Chennevières, Director of Fine Arts, said, after referring to Daubigny's forerunners: "Of those whom I have named, Daubigny came the last, but was neither the least convinced, the least in love with nature, nor the least sincere."

Brilliant technicians have been and are plentiful in French art, but the intellectual power and the original force of such a painter as Daubigny are qualities that cannot be transferred, and no one has since filled the place his death left vacant.

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Robert J. Wickenden.

VOL. XLIV.-45.

DRAWN BY HORACE BRADLEY.

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ENGRAVED BY J. NAYLOR.

RAVEN WHICH HUNG IN DAUBIGNY'S STUDIO.

OUTBOUND.

A LONELY sail in the vast sea-room,

I have put out for the port of gloom.

The voyage is far on the trackless tide,
The watch is long, and the seas are wide.

The headlands blue in the sinking day
Kiss me a hand on the outward way.

The fading gulls, as they dip and veer,
Lift me a voice that is good to hear.

The great winds come, and the heaving sea,
The restless mother, is calling me.

The cry of her heart is lone and wild,
Searching the night for her wandered child.

Beautiful, weariless mother of mine,

In the drift of doom I am here, I am thine.

Beyond the fathom of hope or fear,
From bourn to bourn of the dusk I steer,

Swept on in the wake of the stars, in the stream
Of a roving tide, from dream to dream.

Bliss Carman.

CHARACTERISTICS.

BY S. WEIR MITCHELL, M. D., AUTHOR OF "IN WAR TIME," ETC.

XIX.

T. CLAIR'S tea was postponed, and as the weeks ran by I often saw Miss Leigh at Mrs. Vincent's, and now and then at her own house. No more was

said by me as to her plans. I less and less liked the subject, and when she approached it I merely put the matter aside, saying that it was too late to consider it this year because the college courses were half over, and would she let it rest for a time? But at last Mrs. Leigh, who was irrepressible, urged me to speak again to her daughter, and, seeing that it was as well to make an end of it, I put her off until I could talk once more with Mrs. Vincent.

I learned, of course, that Miss Leigh's plan for a fresh departure in life had become widely known through her mother's freedom of talk, and I did what I could to contradict the gossip. Yet, somehow, the thing haunted me. I seemed to see this handsome, high-minded girl with her exquisite neatness and delicacies of sentiment and manner amidst the scenes and work which belong to the life of the student of medicine. And was I not also a man essentially refined and sensitive? Had it hurt me? I knew it had not. But it is terribly true that a man may do and be that which is for him inconsistent with his ideal of the highest type of womanhood. He may puzzle himself mad with the logic of the thing, and be beaten utterly by its poetry.

At last I found leisure to see Mrs. Vincent. "Do not forget St. Clair's tea," she said; "and come early. It will be amusing. I really made him do it. And the Leighs. Mrs. Leigh told me of your talk. Do you like her?"

"Yes and no. May I speak? She did seem to me hard and-"

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ways, and in business matters, no one is more shrewd; and if he were a man of eminence and force, she would give up once for all. She has no real fight in her, none at all." I smiled.

"Oh, you may laugh." "I only smiled."

"Yes, I know." And she set her large eyes on me watchfully. "Now, suppose by any chance our friend St. Clair were to lose his heart to my friend Miss Alice?" "Impossible."

"Not at all. He comes here every day to talk about her. Now, with Alice's good sense and efficiency, and her mother's-" "Pardon me, what?"

"Oh, her mother's desire to settle Alice, and then Alice's fortune. Now do you not see how very wise a thing it would be?"

"Are you jesting?" I said seriously.

"I? Not at all. I lent Alice his last book, and she is delighted with it. Yesterday she quoted the whole of that poem of his about the storm. If he could only hear her recite it, I-I fancy he would propose on the spot." May I be there to see!"

"And he is so handsome," she returned. "The dear fellow would make any woman hopelessly wretched in a year. If I were you (if you are in earnest, which I doubt a little), I would meddle no more with this matter. I never thought you less reasonable."

"And I think I have annoyed you. Why, I cannot quite see. Am I forgiven?"

"What is there to forgive? Let us talk about the doctor matter. I told her what I thought."

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"All ?"

"No; not all. There are things one cannot discuss fully. But I said I did not believe it was best either for the sick or for society for women to be doctors; that, personally, women lose something of the natural charm of their sex in giving themselves either to this or to the other avocations until now in sole possession of man."

"And I am to think that you mean what you have last said?"

"Yes; most honestly."

"My own mind is hardly clear about it. At all events, it would not trouble Alice Leigh. At least, I don't think it would."

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