It may have been an early feeling after this that at least helped to draw him toward Rembrandt, especially toward his religious subjects. I find more than a little of the latter’s influence in the mural paintings in the churches of St. Thomas and of the Incarnation in New York, particularly in the solemn, serious naturalism of the grouping; in the humble devotion with which the spirit of the occasion has been comprehended, and in the significance of gesture and expression, but especially of gesture, through which this spirit has been embodied. A boy’s freshness of faith, dignified by a man’s realization of its import--a quality very rare at any period, and quite likely to be overlooked in this one. It is the outcome of a religious temperament--a thing very different from the religious habit--born of a capacity to feel deeply the significance of things, and by instinct and culture fitted to see the beauty inherent in the significance, whether it be the significance of the spiritual or of the material life or of the subtle analogy between the two. When the painter can comprehend this and set it down on the threshold of every-day experience, in such a way as to make it intimate without being commonplace, its human meaning neither lessening, nor lost in, the splendour of its expression, we may reasonably call him great. And no one denies to La Farge a splendour of expression. He is that _rara avis_ among artists, who not only sees the world as a pageant of coloured light, but has found means to express his visions. His inherited instinct for colour has been assiduously cultivated by observation and scientific study, the researches of Professor Root of Columbia University having been enthusiastically followed and adapted by him to his practical requirements. When circumstances brought to him the opportunity of executing windows, immediately came into play his extensive memories, his dreams of possibilities, and, equally, his independence of conventionalized methods. Finding that he could not reach adequate results in the material available, and realizing the weakness of existing methods, he experimented until he discovered the adaptabilities of opaline glass, which has a suggestion of complementary colours, “a mysterious quality of showing a golden yellow, associated with violet, a pink flush on a ground of green.” Moreover, by the infinite variety of modulations, which its making admits, it allows a degree of light and shade in each piece of glass, which not only gives modelling, but increases the depth of tone, sufficient at places to make the darker parts melt softly into the harsh lead-line. This invention by John La Farge of the applicability of opaline glass to the making of coloured windows has put a wide range of means in the hands of the artist, not only in the general richness and equally possible delicacy of effect, but in the increased subtlety attainable through complementary effects and effects of opposition; the material including