peasant;
for the majesty of the woods, the broken rocks, the sublime stretches of
meadow-lands with their sights, odors and colors intoxicated him with
their beauty. He felt as if he had never before looked upon God's
beautiful world.

And yet Paris was only a day's journey away! There he could find a market
for his work. To be near a great city is a satisfaction to every
intellectual worker, but, if he is wise, his visits to the city are far
apart. All he needs is the thought that he can go if he chooses.

Millet was thirty-four years of age when he reached Barbizon. There he
was to remain for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life--to live
in the one house--years of toil, and not lacking in poverty, pain and
anxiety, but years of freedom, for he worked as he wished and called no
man master.

It is quite the custom to paint the life of Millet at Barbizon as one of
misery and black unrest; but those who do this are the people who read
pain into his pictures: they do not comprehend the simplicity and
sublimity and quiet joy that were possible in this man's nature, and in
the nature of the people he pictured.

From the time he reached Barbizon there came into his work a largeness, a
majesty and an elevation that is unique in the history of art. Millet's
heart went out to humanity--the humanity that springs from the soil,
lives out its day, and returns to earth. His pictures form an epic of
country life, as he tells of its pains, its anxieties, its
privations--yes, of its peace and abiding faith, and the joy and health
and strength that comes to those who live near to Nature's heart.

Walt Whitman catalogues the workers and toilers, and lists their
occupations in pages that will live; Millet shows us wood-gatherers,
charcoal-burners, shepherds, gleaners, washerwomen, diggers, quarrymen,
road laborers, men at the plow, and women at the loom. Then he shows the
noon-hour, the moments of devotion, the joys of motherhood, the silent
pride of the father, the love of brother and sister and of husband and
wife. And again in the dusk of a winter night we see black-lined against
the sky the bent figure of an old woman, bearing her burden of fagots;
and again we are shown the plain, homely interior of a cottage where the
family watches by the bedside of a dying child.

And always the picture is not quite complete--the faces are never
distinct--no expression of feature is there, but the soul worked up into
the canvas conv