f the secret motives which
influence your conduct, than you oftentimes have yourself. A good
portrait is a kind of biography, and neither painter nor biographer can
carry out his task satisfactorily unless he be admitted behind the
scenes. I think that the landscape painter, who has acquired
sufficient mastery in his art to satisfy his own critical sense, and
who is appreciated enough to find purchasers, and thereby to keep the
wolf from the door, must be of all mankind the happiest. Other men
live in cities, bound down to some settled task and order of life; but
he is a nomad, and wherever he goes "Beauty pitches her tents before
him." He is smitten by a passionate love for Nature, and is privileged
to follow her into her solitary haunts and recesses. Nature is his
mistress, and he is continually making declarations of his love. When
one thinks of ordinary occupations, how one envies him, flecking his
oak-tree boll with sunlight, tinging with rose the cloud of the morning
in which the lark is hid, making the sea's swift fringe of foaming lace
outspread itself on the level sands, in which the pebbles gleam forever
wet. The landscape painter's memory is inhabited by the fairest
visions,--dawn burning on the splintered peaks that the eagles know,
while the valleys beneath are yet filled with uncertain light; the
bright blue morn stretching over miles of moor and mountain; the slow
up-gathering of the bellied thunder-cloud; summer lakes, and cattle
knee-deep in them; rustic bridges forever crossed by old women in
scarlet cloaks; old-fashioned waggons resting on the scrubby common,
the waggoner lazy and wayworn, the dog couched on the ground, its
tongue hanging out in the heat; boats drawn up on the shore at sunset;
the fisher's children looking seawards, the red light full on their
dresses and faces; farther back, a clump of cottages, with bait-baskets
about the door, and the smoke of the evening meal coiling up into the
coloured air. These things are forever with him. Beauty, which is a
luxury to other men, is his daily food. Happy vagabond, who lives the
whole summer through in the light of his mistress's face, and who does
nothing the whole winter except recall the splendour of her smiles!

The vagabond, as I have explained and sketched him, is not a man to
tremble at, or avoid as if he wore contagion in his touch. He is
upright, generous, innocent, is conscientious in the performance of his
duties; and if a