treatment of his strong and original genius. He approached his task with
a broad and comprehensive vision, and a loving and inquiring soul. He
was not satisfied with the revelation of his eyes alone, but sought
earnestly for the secret of nature's life, and of its influence upon
the sensitive mind of man. He perceived the truth that nature without
man is naught, even as there is no color without light, and strove
earnestly to show in his art the relations that they sustain to each
other. He saw, also, that the material in each is nothing without the
spirit which they share in common, and thus he painted not places, but
the influence of places, even as he painted not persons merely, but
their natures and minds. It is for this reason that, although we see in
all his pictures where landscape finds a place the meadows, trees, and
skies of Deerfield, we also see much more,--the general and unlocated
spirit of New-England scenery.

This is the true impressionism--a system to which Fuller was always
constant in later life, and which he developed grandly. He was, however,
as far removed as possible from that cheap, shallow, and idealess school
of French painters whose wrongful appropriation of the name
"Impressionist" has prejudiced us against the principle that it
involves. The inherent difference between them and Fuller lies in
this--he exercised a choice, and thought the beautiful alone to be
worthy of description, while they selected nothing, but painted
indiscriminately all things, with whatever preference they indicated
lying in the direction of the strong and ugly, as being most imperative
in its demands for attention. Fuller's subjects were always sweet and
noble, and it followed as a matter of course that his treatment of them
was refined and strong. His idea was also broad; he sought for the
typical in nature and life, and grew inevitably into a continually
widening and more comprehensive style. He taught himself to lose the