animals.

My acquaintance with Dutch art was made in London at the National
Gallery; now I wanted to see it at home, and understand it as one can
best understand it here.

I soon found the great Rembrandt--"the School of Anatomy," and stood for
a long time looking at the wonderful faces--faces in whose eyes each
thought lay clear to read. What a picture! A man who had done nothing
else all his life long but paint just that, would have earned the right
to be immortal; but to have been only twenty-six when he did it, and
then to have gone on, through year after year, giving the world
masterpieces, and to be repaid by that world in the end with poverty and
hardship! My cheeks burned as I stood thinking of it, and somehow I felt
guilty and responsible, as if I'd lived in Rembrandt's day, and been as
ungrateful as the others.

I had expected to be disappointed in Paul Potter's "Bull," because
people always speak of it at once, if they hear you are going to
Holland; but if you could be disappointed in that young and winning
beast who kindly stands there with diamonds in his great velvet eyes,
and the breath coming and going under his rough, wholesome coat for you
to look at and admire, when all the time you know that he could kill you
if he liked, why, you would deserve to be gored by him and trodden by
his companions.

How I wanted to have known Jan van Steen, and thanked him for his
glorious, rollicking, extraordinary pictures (especially for "The
Poultry Yard"), and have slyly stolen his bottle away from him
sometimes, so that he might have painted even more, and not have come to
ruin in the end! How I loved the gentle Van Ruysdaels, and how pathetic
the everlasting white horse got to seem, after I had seen him repeated
again and again in every sort of tender or eccentric landscape! Poor,
tired white horse! I thought he must have been as weary of his
journeyings as the Wandering Jew.

There are two Rubens in the Mauritshuis which intoxicated me, as if I'd
been drinking new red wine; and there is one little Gerard Douw, above
all other Gerard Douws, worth a three-days' journey on foot to see. In a
window of the Bull's room I found it; and I stood so long staring, that
at last I began to be afraid the others might have gone away. They came
upon me, though, all too soon, and exclaimed, "Why, where _have_ you
been?" and "We've been looking for you _everywhere_." I said I was
sorry, and wondered how I had been so stupid