as distinguished from
nature was far too rudimentary to fit him for a teacher, for his love
of facts and detail blinded him to every other aspect of our relations
with nature, in the recognition of which consist the highest gifts of
the artist.

My study with Church lasted one winter, and showed me that nothing
was to be hoped for from him, and that the most intimate superficial
acquaintance with nature did not involve the perception of her more
intimate relation with art. I learned from him nothing that was worth
remembering, but I made acquaintance with a young portrait painter,
who had a studio in the same building, an Irishman named Boyle, a
pupil of Inman, whose ideas of art were of a far higher order, and to
my intercourse with him during that winter and the following summer,
which we spent together sketching in the valley of the Mohawk, I
owe the first clear ideas of what lay before me in artist life. At
Church's studio I met Edgar A. Poe, a slender, nervous, vivacious,
and extremely refined personage. But at that juncture I came across
"Modern Painters," and, like many others, wiser or otherwise, I
received from it a stimulus to nature worship, to which I was already
too much inclined, which made ineffaceable the confusion in my mind
between nature and art. Another acquaintance I made that winter was
of great importance in developing my technical abilities--that of a
well-known amateur of New York, afterwards a professional artist, Dr.
Edward Ruggles, a physician whose love of painting finally drove him
out of medicine. He had the most catholic and correct taste I had
then met, and he introduced me to William Page, the most remarkable
portrait painter in many respects America has ever produced, whose
talks on art used to make me sleepless with enthusiasm. Page was the
most brilliant talker I ever met, and a dear friend of Lowell.

Returning to Schenectady the following summer, I made my first direct
and thorough studies from nature, and amongst these was one, a view
from my window across gardens and a churchyard with the church spire
in the distance; a small study which incidentally had a most potent
effect on all my later life. It was bought in the autumn by the Art
Union of New York, and on the proceeds, thirty dollars, the first
considerable sum of money I had ever earned, I decided to go to Europe
and see what the English painters were doing. Of English art I
then knew only directly the pictures of Dought