repaired to work and dream.  For sixteen years, in the midst of the fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions.  The secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may gain some hint of his experiences.  It is not to be questioned that he drew from the New-England soil that he tilled, and the air that he breathed, an inspiration which never failed him.  The flavor of the quiet valley fills all his canvases.  We see in them the spaciousness of its meadows, the inviting slope of its low hills, the calm grandeur of its encircling mountains, the mysterious gloom and wholesome brightness of its changing skies, the atmosphere of history and romance which is its breath and life.  Song and story have found many incidents for treatment in this locality.  Not far from the farm where Fuller’s daily work was done, the tragedy of Bloody Brook was enacted; the fields which he tilled have their legend of Indian ambuscade and massacre; the soil is sown, as with dragon’s teeth, with the arrow-heads and battle-axes of many bitter conflicts; even to the ancient house where, in recent years, the painter’s summer easel was set up, a former owner was brought home with the red man’s bullet in his breast.  The menace of midnight attack seems even now to the wanderer in the darkness to burden the air of these mournful meadows, and tradition shows that here were felt the ripples of that tide of superstitious frenzy which flowed from Salem through all the early colonies.  No place could have furnished more potent suggestions to the art-idealist than this, and although it did not lead him to paint its tragic history (for no man had less liking for violence and passion than he), it impressed him deeply with its concurrent records of endurance and devotion.  Nor did it invite him, as it might have done in the case of a weaker man, into mere description, but having aroused his thought, it submitted itself wholly to the treatment of his strong and original genius.  He approached his task with a broad and comprehensive vision, and a loving and inquiring soul.  He was not satisfied with the revelation of his eyes alone, but sought earnestly for the secret of nature’s life, and of its influence upon the sensitive mind of man.  He perceived the truth that nature without man is naught, even as there is no color without light, and strove earnestly to show in his art the relations that they sustain to each other.  He saw, also, that the material in each is nothing without the spirit which they share in common, and thus he painted not places, but the influence of places, even as he painted not persons merely, but their natures and minds.  It is for this reason that, although we see in all his pictures where landscape finds a place the meadows, trees, and skies of Deerfield, we also see much more,—­the general and unlocated spirit of New-England scenery.