y, an early artistic
immigrant from England, and, as afterwards appeared to me, a fair
example of the school which had its lead from Constable, to whom he
had, however, no resemblance except in choice of motive. He had a
comprehension of technique possessed by none of our home painters--a
rapid and masterly execution with a scale of color limited to cool
grays, but, within this gamut, of exquisite refinement. Constant
repetitions of the same motive wore out his welcome on the part of the
American public, but his pictures had a charm which was long in losing
its power over me, and had an influence in determining me to go to
England at the first opportunity. But to see Turner's pictures was
always the chief motive, and was the one which decided me to go.

I was, in knowledge of worldly life, scarcely less a child then than
I had been when, at the age of ten, I determined to go out into the
world and make my own career, free from the obstacles I imagined to
be preventing me from following my ideals. The ever-present feeling
developed in me by the religious training of my mother, that an
overruling Providence had my life in keeping, made me quite oblivious
of or indifferent to the chances of disaster, for the assurance of
protection and leading to the best end left no place for anxieties. It
was a mental phenomenon which I now look back on with a wonder which
I think most sane people will share, that, at the age when most boys
have become men, for I graduated at twenty, I should have been capable
of going out into a strange world like one of the children of the
Children's Crusade, with an unfaltering faith that I should be led
and cared for by Providence as I had been by my parents. I had no
apprehension, from the moment that one of the ship-owners who was in
business relations with my elder brother offered me a free passage
on one of his sailing ships to Liverpool, that I should not find a
similar bridge back again; and with my thirty dollars changed into six
sovereigns, and a little valise with only a change of clothes, I went
on board the Garrick, a packet of the Black Ball line, sailing in the
last days of December, 1849. There had been a thaw and the Hudson
River was full of floating ice, which in the ebbing of the tide
endangered the shipping lying out in the stream, and the captain made
such haste to get out of the danger (the extent of which was shown by
the topmasts of an Austrian brig, showing above water where sh