associates excited no little appreciative comment upon this tendency.  In some of his portraits of women of that period, wherein he evidently attempted to present the superior fineness and sensibility of the feminine nature, this effort toward ideality is quite strongly indicated; they are painted with a more hesitating and lingering touch than his portraits of men, and with a certain seeming lack of confidence, which throws about them a thin fold of that veil of etherialism and mystery which so enwraps nearly all his pictures of the last eight years.  This treatment, however, seems to have been at that time more the result of experiment than conviction; later in life he wrought its suggestions into a system, the principles of which we may study further on.  His earlier work, as has been said, was chiefly confined to portrait-painting, although it is a significant fact that among his pictures of that time are two which show that the feeling for poetical and imaginative effort was working in him.  At a comparatively early age he painted an impression of Coleridge’s Genevieve, which showed marked evidence of power, and later, after seeing a picture of the school of Rubens, which was owned by one of his artist friends, produced a study which he afterward seems to have developed into his well-known Boy and Bird; a Cupid-like figure, holding a bird closely against its breast.  These exercises, however, seem to have been, as it were, accidental, and had little or no effect in leading him to the practice in which he afterward became absorbed.

His life in New York, which was interrupted only by three winter trips to the South, whither he went in the hope of securing some commissions for portraits, was an uneventful experience of very modest pecuniary success, and brought him as the only official honor of his life an election as associate of the National Academy of Design.  He then went to Europe, where, for eight months, he carefully studied the old masters in the principal galleries of England and the Continent.  This visit to the Old World was of incalculable value to him in the method of painting which he afterward made his own, and, in point of fact, gave him his first decided inclination toward it.  Its best influence, however, was in giving him confidence in himself, and assurance of the reasonableness of the views which he had already begun to entertain.  He had been led before to regard the old masters as superior to rivalry and incapable of weakness, superhuman characters, indeed, whose works should discourage effort.  Instead of this, however, he found them to be men like himself, with their share of defect and error, yet made grand by inspiration and idea, and this knowledge greatly encouraged him, a man who of all painters was at once the most modest and devoted.  Most painters who resort to Europe to study the old art find there one or two men whose works make the strongest appeals to their liking, and, devoting their attention chiefly to these, they show ever after the