s confessing neither pride
nor self-distrust. The serenity of their style he sought at once to
appropriate, and thereafter worked as much as possible in imitation of
their evident purpose, striving simply to do his best, without any
question of whether the result would please, or another's effort be
reckoned as greater than his own. It became a governing principle with
him never to seek to outdo any one, or to feel anything but pleasure at
another's success, for he was not a man who could fail to recognize the
truth that envy is fatal to a fine mood in any labor. Few artists, we
may well believe, study the great art of the world in this spirit, or
derive from it such a lesson.

On his return to America, he betook himself to his native town of
Deerfield, to assume for a time the care of the ancestral farm, which
the death of his father had placed in his hands. He had returned from
Europe full of inspired ideas, and was apparently ready to go on at once
in new paths of labor; but the voice of duty seemed to him to call him
away from his chosen life, and he obeyed its summons without hesitation.
Moreover, he loved the country and the family homestead, and may have
perceived, also, that the condition of art in Boston and New York was
not such as to encourage an original purpose, and that, if he was ever
to gain success, he must develop himself in quiet, and aloof from the
distracting influences of other methods and men. It is easy to perceive,
with the complete record of his life before us, that this experience of
labor and thought upon the Deerfield farm, although at first sight
forming an hiatus in his career, was really its most pregnant period,
and that without it the Fuller who is now so much admired might have
been lost to us, and the spirit that appears in his later works never
have been awakened. It is, indeed, a spirit that can find no congenial
dwelling-place in towns, but makes its home in the fields and on the
hillsides, to which the poet-painter, depressed but not cast down by his
experience of life, repaired to work and dream. For sixteen years, in
the midst of the fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the
contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet
of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The
secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and
melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from
the works that r