s, across, mainly unbroken
wildwood, cut up by rapid rivers, impossible of navigation, otherwise
than by canoes and light skiffs which could be carried from one sheet
of water to another on the backs of the woodsmen, around the cascades,
and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without
roads, and, to a large extent, without paths. I hoped here to find new
subjects for art, spiritual freedom, and a closer contact with the
spiritual world--something beyond the material existence. I was
ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor
spiritual life on isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found,
what a correct philosophy would have before told me, nature with no
suggestion of art, and the dullest form of intellectual or spiritual
existence.

One of my artist friends--S.R. Gifford, landscape painter, like myself
on the search for new subjects--had been, the year before, to the
Saranac Lakes, and gave me the clue to the labyrinth, and I found on
Upper Saranac Lake a log cabin, inhabited by a farmer whose family
consisted of a wife, a son, and a daughter. There I enjoyed a
backwoods hospitality at the cost of two dollars a week for board
and lodging, and passed the whole summer, finding a subject near the
cabin, at which I painted assiduously for nearly three months. I
passed the whole day in the open air, wore no hat, and only cloth
shoes, hoping that thus the spiritual life would have easier access to
me. I carried no gun, and held the lives of beast and bird sacred,
but I drew the line at fishing, and my rod and fly-book provided in a
large degree the food of the household; for trout swarmed. I caught in
an hour, during that summer, in a stream where there has not been a
trout for years, as large a string as I could carry a mile. All
the time that I was not painting I was in the boat on the lake, or
wandering in the forest.

My quest was an illusion. The humanity of the backwoods was on a
lower level than that of a New England village--more material if less
worldly; the men got intoxicated, and some of the women--nothing less
like an apostle could I have found in the streets of New York. I saw
one day a hunter who had come into the woods with a motive in some
degree like mine--impatience of the restraints and burdens of
civilization, and pure love of solitude. He had become, not
bestialized, like most of the men I saw, but animalized--he had
drifted back into the condition of his