There was vigour in these strong, simple men, masculine in sensibility all of them, and a fine feeling for the poetic shades of existence. They were intensely serious men, and I think from their isolation in various ways, not popular in their time. Neither are they popular now. They will only be admired by artists of perception, and by laymen of keen sensibility. Whether their enforced isolations taught them to brood, or whether they were brooders by nature, it is difficult to say. I think they were all easterners, and this would explain away certain characteristic shynesses of temper and of expression in them. Ryder, as we know, was the typical recluse, Fuller in all likelihood also. Martin I know little of privately, but his portrait shows him to be a strong elemental nature, with little feeling for, or interest in, the superficialities either of life or of art. Of Blakelock I can say but little, for I do not know him beyond a few stylish canvases which seem to have more of Diaz and Rousseau in them than contributes to real originality, and he was one of the painters of repetition also. A single good Blakelock is beautiful, and I think he must be included among the American imaginatives, but I do not personally feel the force of him in several canvases together. All of these artists are singularly individual, dreamers like Mathew Maris and Marees of Europe. They all have something of Coleridge about them, something of Poe, something of the "Ancient Mariner" and the "Haunted Palace", sailors in the same ship, sleepers in the same house. All of these men were struggling at the same time, the painters I mean, the same hour it might be said, in the midst of conventions of a severer type of rigidity than now, to preserve themselves from commonplace utterance. They were not affected by fashions. They had the one idea in mind, to express themselves in terms of themselves, and they were singularly successful in this despite the various difficulties of circumstance and of temper that attended them. They understood what this was better than anyone, and the results in varying degrees of genius attest to the quality of the American imagination at its best.