ent forward in sanded
provincial inn-parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons, who is still conveniently
young, waked to his first vision of pleasant material in the
comprehensive county of Somerset--a capital centre of impression for a
painter of the bucolic. He has been to America; he has even reproduced
with remarkable discrimination and truth some of the way-side objects
of that country, not making them look in the least like their English
equivalents, if equivalents they may be said to have. Was it there that
Mr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear?
I ask this idle question simply because the England of his pencil, and
not less of his brush (of his eminent brush there would be much to say),
is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted
to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the
delightful testimony it inherits. It was scarcely to have been supposed
possible that the native point of view would embrace and observe so
many of the things that the more or less famished outsider is, in vulgar
parlance, "after." In other words (though I appear to utter a foolish
paradox), the danger might have been that Mr. Parsons knew his subject
too well to feel it--to feel it, I mean, _a l'Americaine_. He is as
tender of it as if he were vague about it, and as certain of it as if he
were _blase_.

But after having wished that his country should be just so, we proceed
to discover that it is in fact not a bit different. Between these phases
of our consciousness he is an unfailing messenger. The reader will
remember how often he has accompanied with pictures the text of some
amiable paper describing a pastoral region--Warwickshire or Surrey.
Devonshire or the Thames. He will remember his exquisite designs for
certain of Wordsworth's sonnets. A sonnet of Wordsworth is a difficult
thing to illustrate, but Mr. Parsons' ripe taste has shown him the way.
Then there are lovely morsels from his hand associated with the drawings
of his friend Mr. Abbey--head-pieces, tailpieces, vignettes, charming
combinations of flower and foliage, decorative clusters of all sorts
of pleasant rural emblems. If he has an inexhaustible feeling for the
country in general, his love of the myriad English flowers is perhaps
the fondest part of it. He draws them with a rare perfection, and
always--little definite, delicate, tremulous things as they are--with
a certain nobleness. This latter quality, indeed. I