that the hour of arrival was generally anticipated correctly.  In those days the steamers were rarely driven, and a voyage of fourteen days was not considered a bad one.  A day’s run of 336 knots was a triumph of steaming and rarely attained.  But we were at the beginning of the contest between the Collins and the Cunard steamers, and up to that time the American line had generally a little the better of it.

The rest of that year and the year following were given to hard and monotonous painting from nature while the weather permitted, and in the winter to working out clumsily the mysteries of picture-making, a work which, as I was without direction or any correct appreciation of what I had it in me to do, became a drudgery which I went through as an indispensable duty, but with no satisfaction.  My larger studies from nature (25x30 inches) had attracted attention and had been hung on the line, getting for me the election to the Associateship of Design, and the appellation of the “American Pre-Raphaelite,”—­all which for a man so lately embarked in the profession was considered a high honor, as it really was.  But the success only confirmed me in my incorrect views of art and carried me farther from the true path.  As studies from nature, the fidelity and completeness of them, even in comparison with Durand’s, was something which the conventional landscape known then and there had never approached, and to the respectable amateurs of that day they were puzzles.  In one of them, a study of a wood scene with a spring of water overshadowed by a beech-tree, all painted at close quarters, I had transplanted a violet which I wanted in the near foreground, so as to be sure that it was in correct light and proportion.  This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle.  On that study I spent such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then the coming of autumn stopped me.  Any difficulty in literal rendering of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of work there is little difference, for it is but copying, and requires only a correct eye and infinite patience, both of which I had; and it was a puzzle to me rather than a compliment when the veteran Durand said to me of one of my studies, that it was a subject he would not have dared attack on account of the difficulty of the effect of light, for to me it was simply a question of time and sticking to it.  It was not art, but the public did not know it any more than I did, and I was admitted to a place which I believe was one of the highest amongst my contemporaries at home in a way that led to little even in its complete success.  I influenced some of my contemporaries and gave a jog to the landscape painting of the day, and there it ended, through a diversion of my ambition to another sphere, but there it must have ended; even if I had never been so diverted.

CHAPTER VII