is life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in
the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an
appearance for him in the light of a busy world.

Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a
relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I
would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that
he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.

There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility
all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence.
They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in
various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now.
They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of
keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to
brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to
say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away
certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them.
Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood
also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to
be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in,
the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say
but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which
seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to
real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A
single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included
among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the
force of him in several canvases together.

All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew
Maris and Marees of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about
them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the
"Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same
house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters
I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions
of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from
commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had
the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves,
and they were singularly successful in this despite the various
difficulties of circumstance and of