Now, with regard to Murillo, it appeared to me that he was a man of rather a mediocre mind, with nothing very high or deep to say, but that he was gifted with an exquisite faculty of expressing what he did say; and his paintings seem to me to bear an analogy to Pope’s poetry, wherein the power of expression is wrought to the highest point, but without freshness or ideality in the conception.  As Pope could reproduce in most exquisite wording the fervent ideas of Eloisa, without the power to originate such, so Murillo reproduced the current and floating religious ideas of his times, with most exquisite perfection of art and color, but without ideality or vitality.  The pictures of his which please me most are his beggar boys and flower girls, where he abandons the region of ideality, and simply reproduces nature.  His art and coloring give an exquisite grace to such sketches.

As to Vandyke, though evidently a fine painter, he is one whose mind does not move me.  He adds nothing to my stock of thoughts—­awakens no emotion.  I know it is a fine picture, just as I have sometimes been conscious in church that I was hearing a fine sermon, which somehow had not the slightest effect upon me.

Rubens, on the contrary, whose pictures I detested with all the energy of my soul, I knew and felt all the time, by the very pain he gave me, to be a real living artist.  There was a Venus and Cupid there, as fat and as coarse as they could be, but so freely drawn, and so masterly in their expression and handling, that one must feel that they were by an artist, who could just as easily have painted them any other way if it had suited his sovereign pleasure, and therefore we are the more vexed with him.  When your taste is crossed by a clever person, it always vexes you more than when it is done by a stupid one, because it is done with such power that there is less hope for you.

There were a number of pictures of Cuyp there, which satisfied my thirst for coloring, and appeared to me as I expected the Claudes would have done.  Generally speaking, his objects are few in number and commonplace in their character—­a bit of land and water, a few cattle and figures, in no way remarkable; but then he floods the whole with that dreamy, misty sunlight, such as fills the arches of our forests in the days of autumn.  As I looked at them I fancied I could hear nuts dropping from the trees among the dry leaves, and see the goldenrods and purple asters, and hear the click of the squirrel as he whips up the tree to his nest.  For this one attribute of golden, dreamy haziness, I like Cuyp.  His power in shedding it over very simple objects reminds me of some of the short poems of Longfellow, when things in themselves most prosaic are flooded with a kind of poetic light from the inner soul.  These are merely first ideas and impressions.  Of course I do not make up my mind about any artist from what I have seen here.  We must not expect a painter