ly in the fairy-land of his fancy? For the
peculiar sign of his talent is surely this observation in the remote. It
brings the remote near to us, but such a complicated journey as it must
first have had to make! Remote in time (in differing degrees), remote
in place, remote in feeling, in habit, and in their ambient air, are the
images that spring from his pencil, and yet all so vividly, so minutely,
so consistently seen! Where does he see them, where does he find them,
how does he catch them, and in what language does he delightfully
converse with them? In what mystic recesses of space does the revelation
descend upon him?

The questions flow from the beguiled but puzzled admirer, and their
tenor sufficiently expresses the claim I make for the admirable artist
when I say that his truth is interfused with poetry. He spurns the
literal and yet superabounds in the characteristic, and if he makes
the strange familiar he makes the familiar just strange enough to be
distinguished. Everything is so human, so humorous and so caught in the
act, so buttoned and petticoated and gartered, that it might be round
the corner; and so it is--but the corner is the corner of another world.
In that other world Mr. Abbey went forth to dwell in extreme youth, as I
need scarcely be at pains to remind those who have followed him in
Harper. It is not important here to give a catalogue of his
contributions to that journal: turn to the back volumes and you will
meet him at every step. Every one remembers his young, tentative,
prelusive illustrations to Herrick, in which there are the prettiest
glimpses, guesses and foreknowledge of the effects he was to make
completely his own. The Herrick was done mainly, if I mistake not,
before he had been to England, and it remains, in the light of this
fact, a singularly touching as well as a singularly promising
performance. The eye of sense in such a case had to be to a rare extent
the mind's eye, and this convertibility of the two organs has persisted.

From the first and always that other world and that qualifying medium
in which I have said that the human spectacle goes on for Mr. Abbey have
been a county of old England which is not to be found in any geography,
though it borders, as I have hinted, on the Worcestershire Broadway. Few
artistic phenomena are more curious than the congenital acquaintance of
this perverse young Philadelphian with that mysterious locality. It is
there that he finds them al