venture, but fortunately found my brother on
the wharf expecting the arrival of the steamer, her trips having
been made with such precision that the hour of arrival was generally
anticipated correctly. In those days the steamers were rarely driven,
and a voyage of fourteen days was not considered a bad one. A day's
run of 336 knots was a triumph of steaming and rarely attained. But
we were at the beginning of the contest between the Collins and the
Cunard steamers, and up to that time the American line had generally a
little the better of it.

The rest of that year and the year following were given to hard and
monotonous painting from nature while the weather permitted, and in
the winter to working out clumsily the mysteries of picture-making, a
work which, as I was without direction or any correct appreciation of
what I had it in me to do, became a drudgery which I went through as
an indispensable duty, but with no satisfaction. My larger studies
from nature (25x30 inches) had attracted attention and had been hung
on the line, getting for me the election to the Associateship of
Design, and the appellation of the "American Pre-Raphaelite,"--all
which for a man so lately embarked in the profession was considered a
high honor, as it really was. But the success only confirmed me in my
incorrect views of art and carried me farther from the true path. As
studies from nature, the fidelity and completeness of them, even
in comparison with Durand's, was something which the conventional
landscape known then and there had never approached, and to the
respectable amateurs of that day they were puzzles. In one of them,
a study of a wood scene with a spring of water overshadowed by a
beech-tree, all painted at close quarters, I had transplanted a violet
which I wanted in the near foreground, so as to be sure that it was in
correct light and proportion. This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian
doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent
such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then
the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty in literal rendering
of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of
work there is little difference, for it is but copying, and requires
only a correct eye and infinite patience, both of which I had; and it
was a puzzle to me rather than a compliment when the veteran Durand
said to me of one of my studies, that it was a subject he would not