e, as painter and artist of no mean
order, by a certain distinction inherent in him. He had little feeling
for synthesis outside of the water-colours, and here it was necessary
by virtue of the limitations of the medium.

Winslow Homer will not stimulate for all time only because his mind
was too local. There is nothing of universal appeal in him. His
realism will never reach the height even of the sea-pieces of Courbet,
and I shall include Ryder as well. Courbet was a fine artist, and so
was Ryder, and both had the advantage of exceptional imagination.
Homer and Ryder are natives of the same coast and typify excellently
the two poles in the New England temper, both in art and in life.
Homer as realist, had the one idea in mind only, to illustrate realism
as best he could in the most distinguished terms at the disposal of
his personality. He succeeded admirably.

Homer typifies a certain sturdiness in the American temper at least,
and sends the lighter men away with his roughness, as doubtless he
sent the curious away from his cliffs with the acidity of truth he
poured upon them. He had lived so much in the close association of the
roughest elements in existence, rocks and the madly swinging sea that
glides over and above them defiantly, that he had without doubt taken
on the character of them. The portrait of Homer gives him as one would
expect him to look, and he looks like his pictures. His visage bore a
ferocity that had to be met with a rocky certainty. It is evident
there was no fooling him. He was filled with yankee tenacity and
yankee courage. Homer is what you would expect to find if you were
told to hunt up the natives of "Prout's Neck" or "Perkins Cove," or
any of the inlets of the Maine coast. These sea people live so much
with the roughness of the sea, that if they are at all inclined to
acidity, and the old fashioned yankee was sure to be, they take on the
hard edges of a man's temper in accordance with the jaggedness of the
shores on which they live. The man around the rocks looks so very like
the profiles one sees in the rocks themselves. They have absorbed the
energy of the dramatic elements they cope with, and you may be sure
that life around the sea in New England is no easy existence; and they
give out the same salty equivalent in human association.

If you have lived by the sea, you have learned the significance of the
bravery of sea people, and you learn to understand and excuse the
sharpness of