autiful views to literary men--Montaigne--Views from the author's
windows.

Nothing in the life of an artist is more agreeable than the building and
furnishing of the studio in which he hopes to produce his most mature
and perfect work. It is so pleasant to labor when we are surrounded by
beauty and convenience, that painters find a large and handsome studio
to be an addition to the happiness of their lives, and they usually
dream of it, and plan it, several years before the dream is realized.

Only a few days ago I was talking on this very subject with an
intellectual friend who is not an artist, and who maintained that the
love of fine studios is in great part a mere illusion. He admitted the
necessity for size, and for a proper kind of light, but laughed at
carved oak, and tapestry, and armor, and the knicknacks that artists
encumber themselves with. He would have it that a mind thoroughly
occupied with its own business knew nothing whatever of the objects that
surrounded it, and he cited two examples--Saint Bernard, who travelled
all day by the shore of Lake Leman without seeing it, and the _pere_
Ravignan, who worked in a bare little room with a common table of
blackened pine and a cheap rush-bottomed chair. On this I translated to
him, from Goethe's life by Lewes, a passage which was new to him and
delighted him as a confirmation of his theory. The biographer describes
the poet's study as "a low-roofed narrow room, somewhat dark, for it is
lighted only through two tiny windows, and furnished with a simplicity
quite touching to behold. In the centre stands a plain oval table of
unpolished oak. No arm-chair is to be seen, no sofa, nothing which
speaks of ease. A plain hard chair has beside it the basket in which he
used to place his handkerchief. Against the wall, on the right, is a
long pear-tree table, with bookshelves, on which stand lexicons and
manuals.... On the side-wall again, a bookcase with some works of poets.
On the wall to the left is a long desk of soft wood, at which he was
wont to write. A sheet of paper with notes of contemporary history is
fastened near the door. The same door leads into a bed-room, if bed-room
it can be called, which no maid-of-all-work in England would accept
without a murmur: it is a closet with a window. A simple bed, an
armchair by its side, and a tiny washing-table with a small white basin
on it, and a sponge, is all the furniture. To enter this room with any
feeling for t