lack of confidence on the part of those who have already
perceived, in much of Mr. Parsons' work, a supreme illustration of all
that is widely nature-loving in the English interest in the flower.
No sweeter submission to mastery can be imagined than the way the
daffodils, under his brush (to begin at the beginning), break out
into early April in the lovely drawings of Stourhead. One of the most
charming of these--a corner of an old tumbled-up place in Wiltshire,
where many things have come and gone--represents that moment of
transition in which contrast is so vivid as to make it more dramatic
than many plays--the very youngest throb of spring, with the brown slope
of the foreground coming back to consciousness in pale lemon-colored
patches and, on the top of the hill, against the still cold sky, the
equally delicate forms of the wintry trees. By the time these forms
have thickened, the expanses of daffodil will have become a mass
of bluebells. All the daffodil pictures have a rare loveliness, but
especially those that deal also with the earlier fruit-blossom, the
young plum-trees in Berkshire orchards. Here the air is faintly pink,
and the painter makes us feel the little _blow_ in the thin blue sky.
The spring, fortunately, is everybody's property and, in the language of
all the arts, the easiest word to conjure with. It is therefore partly
Mr. Parsons' good-luck that we enjoy so his rendering of these phases;
but on the other hand we look twice when it's a case of meddling with
the exquisite, and if he inspires us with respect it is because we feel
that he has been deeply initiated. No one knows better the friendly
reasons for our stopping, when chatting natives pronounce the weather
"foine," at charming casual corners of old villages, where grassy ways
cross each other and timbered houses bulge irregularly and there are
fresh things behind crooked palings; witness the little vision of
Blewbury, in Berkshire, reputedly of ancient British origin, with a
road all round it and only footways within. No one, in the Herefordshire
orchards, masses the white cow-parsley in such profusion under the
apple blossoms; or makes the whitewashed little damson-trees look so
innocently responsible and charming on the edge of the brook over which
the planks are laid for the hens. Delightful, in this picture, is the
sense of the clean spring day, after rain, with the blue of the sky
washed faint. Delightful is the biggish view (one of the