Seven years went dragging by, and one morning there came word from London that the Duchess of Orleans, the mother of the beloved Marie, was dying.  Scheffer was ill, but he braced himself for the effort, and hastily started away alone, leaving a note for Cornelie.

He arrived in England in time to attend the funeral of his lifelong friend, and then he himself was seized with a deadly illness.

His daughter was sent for, and when she came the sick man’s longing desire was to get back to France.  If he was to die, he wanted to die at home.  “To die at home at last,” is the prayer of every wanderer.  Ary Scheffer’s prayer was answered.  He expired in the arms of his beloved daughter on June Fifteenth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight, aged sixty-three years.

FRANCOIS MILLET

When I meet a laborer on the edge of a field, I stop and look at the man:  born amid the grain where he will be reaped, and turning up with his plow the ground of his tomb, mixing his burning sweat with the icy rain of Autumn.  The furrow he has just turned is a monument that will outlive him.  I have seen the pyramids of Egypt, and the forgotten furrows of our heather:  both alike bear witness to the work of man and the shortness of his days.

    —­Chateaubriand

[Illustration:  Francois Millet]

Jean Francois Millet is to art what Wagner is to music, or what Whitman is to poetry.  These men, one a Frenchman, another a German, the third an American, taught the same gospel at the same time, using different languages, and each quite unaware of the existence of the others.  They were all revolutionaries; and success came so tardily to them that flattery did not taint their native genius.

“Great men never come singly,” says Emerson.

Richard Wagner was born in the year Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, Millet in Eighteen Hundred Fourteen, and Whitman in Eighteen Hundred Nineteen.  “Tannhauser” was first produced in Eighteen Hundred Forty-five; the “Sower” was exhibited in Eighteen Hundred Fifty; and in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five “Leaves of Grass” appeared.

The reception accorded to each masterpiece was about the same; and all would have fallen flat had it not been for the gibes and jeers and laughter which the work called forth.

Wagner was arrested for being an alleged rioter; Whitman was ejected from his clerkship and his book looked after by the Attorney-General of Massachusetts; Millet was hooted by his fellow-students and dubbed the Wild-Man-of-the-Woods.

In a letter to Pelloquet, Millet says, “The creations that I depict must have the air of being native to their situation, so that no one looking on them shall imagine they are anything else than what they are.”

In his first preface to “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman writes:  “The art of arts, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity. * * * To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside, is the flawless triumph of art.”