us feel the charm of tranquillity.  Indeed, this remark of his about the joyous side of things was made in the dark, early days when life was hardest for him.  He broadened in his view as he grew older and conditions became more tolerable, and he has painted a whole series of little pictures of family life and of childhood that, in their smiling seriousness, are endlessly delightful.  The same science, the same thoughtfulness, the same concentration and intellectual grasp that defined for us the superb gesture of “The Sower” have gone to the depiction of the adorable uncertainty, between walking and falling, of those “First Steps” (Pl. 8) from the mother’s lap to the outstretched arms of the father; and the result, in this case as in the other, is a thing perfectly and permanently expressed.  Whatever Millet has done is done.  He has “characterized the type,” as it was his dream to do, and written “hands off” across his subject for all future adventurers.

Finally, he rises to an almost lyric fervor in that picture of the little “Goose Girl” bathing, which is one of the most purely and exquisitely beautiful things in art.  In this smooth, young body quivering with anticipation of the coolness of the water; in these rounded, slender limbs with their long, firm, supple lines; in the unconscious, half-awkward grace of attitude and in the glory of sunlight splashing through the shadow of the willows, there is a whole song of joy and youth and the goodness of the world.  The picture exists in a drawing or pastel, which has been photographed by Braun, as well as in the oil-painting, and Millet’s habit of returning again and again to a favorite subject renders it difficult to be certain which is the earlier of the two; but I imagine this drawing to be a study for the picture.  At first sight the figure in it is more obviously beautiful than in the other version, and it is only after a time that one begins to understand the changes that the artist was impelled to make.  It is almost too graceful, too much like an antique nymph.  No one could find any fault with it, but by an almost imperceptible stiffening of the line here and there, a little greater turn of the foot upon the ankle and of the hand upon the wrist, the figure in the painting has been given an accent of rusticity that makes it more human, more natural, and more appealing.  She is no longer a possible Galatea or Arethusa, she is only a goose girl, and we feel but the more strongly on that account the eternal poem of the healthy human form.

[Illustration:  Plate 7.—­Millet.  “The New-Born Calf.”  In the Art Institute, Chicago.]