appreciative comment upon this tendency. In some of his portraits of
women of that period, wherein he evidently attempted to present the
superior fineness and sensibility of the feminine nature, this effort
toward ideality is quite strongly indicated; they are painted with a
more hesitating and lingering touch than his portraits of men, and with
a certain seeming lack of confidence, which throws about them a thin
fold of that veil of etherialism and mystery which so enwraps nearly all
his pictures of the last eight years. This treatment, however, seems to
have been at that time more the result of experiment than conviction;
later in life he wrought its suggestions into a system, the principles
of which we may study further on. His earlier work, as has been said,
was chiefly confined to portrait-painting, although it is a significant
fact that among his pictures of that time are two which show that the
feeling for poetical and imaginative effort was working in him. At a
comparatively early age he painted an impression of Coleridge's
Genevieve, which showed marked evidence of power, and later, after
seeing a picture of the school of Rubens, which was owned by one of his
artist friends, produced a study which he afterward seems to have
developed into his well-known Boy and Bird; a Cupid-like figure, holding
a bird closely against its breast. These exercises, however, seem to
have been, as it were, accidental, and had little or no effect in
leading him to the practice in which he afterward became absorbed.

His life in New York, which was interrupted only by three winter trips
to the South, whither he went in the hope of securing some commissions
for portraits, was an uneventful experience of very modest pecuniary
success, and brought him as the only official honor of his life an
election as associate of the National Academy of Design. He then went to
Europe, where, for eight months, he carefully studied the old masters in
the principal galleries of England and the Continent. This visit to the