n, in the picture
which presents the charming house in profile. The artist shows us later,
in September, at Gravetye, the pale violet multitude of the Michaelmas
daisies; another I great bunch, or bank, of which half masks and greatly
beautifies the rather bare yellow cottage at Broadway. This brings us on
to the autumn, if I count as autumnal the admirable large water-color of
a part of a garden at Shiplake, with the second bloom of the roses and
a glimpse of a turn of the Thames. This exquisite picture expresses to
perfection the beginning of the languor of the completed season--with
its look of warm rest, of doing nothing, in the cloudless sky. To the
same or a later moment belongs the straight walk at Fladbury--the old
rectory garden by the Avon, with its Irish yews and the red lady in her
chair; also the charming water-color of young, slim apple-trees, full of
fruit (this must be October), beneath an admirable blue and white sky.
Still later comes the big pear-tree that has turned, among barer boughs,
to flame-color, and, in another picture, the very pale russet of
the thinned cherry-trees, standing, beneath a grayish sky, above a
foreshortened slope. Last of all we have, in oils, December and a hard
frost in a bare apple-orchard, indented with a deep gully which makes
the place somehow a subject and which, in fact, three or four years
ago, made it one for a larger picture by Mr. Parsons, full of truth and
style.

This completes his charming story of the life of the English year, told
in a way that convinces us of his intimate acquaintance with it. Half
the interest of Mr. Parsons' work is in the fact that he paints from a
full mind and from a store of assimilated knowledge. In every touch of
nature that he communicates to us we feel something of the thrill of the
whole--we feel the innumerable relations, the possible variations of the
particular objects. This makes his manner serious and masculine--rescues
it from the thinness of tricks and the coquetries of _chic_. We walk
with him on a firm earth, we taste the tone of the air and seem to take
nature and the climate and all the complicated conditions by their big
general hand. The painter's manner, in short, is one with the study of
things--his talent is a part of their truth. In this happy series
we seem to see still more how that talent was formed, how his rich
motherland has been, from the earliest observation, its nurse and
inspirer. He gives back to her all