At length, however, he finds again the fundamental motive which he needs, this time in the inspiration of the ocean. Off and on for many years he has led the life of a recluse on a spit of land near Scarboro, Maine, whose brown rocks piled in diagonal strata have from time immemorial withstood the onset of the Atlantic combers; an atom of impregnable stability in presence of vastness, solitude, and the perpetual flux of elemental forces. Grounded on his own stalwart individuality, he has kept himself aloof from the truck and scrimage of conventional life and filled his soul with the vastness of nature. How instances of this isolation from the world multiply in the story of art: Watteau retreating into the impenetrability of his own soul; Delacroix and Puvis de Chavannes into their barred studios; Rousseau, Millet, and the rest of their brotherhood into the recesses of the forest. Such isolation seems to be the road to greatness; partly, perhaps, because the man himself must have the elements of greatness in him to wish to do without the constant reinforcement of the world, where men and women prop their shoulders together and make believe that they are standing independently. Henceforth, then, the ocean supplies the ground-bass of motive in Homer’s art, and the magnitude of its influence begins to inform his work. Deepening in significance, it becomes simpler in expression, and the simplicity is revealed in a fuller synthesis of manner; it grows in comprehension, in force and directness, gaining breadth and freedom of execution, greater purity and subtlety of colour. But he does not at once realize the full significance of the ocean itself. For a time he sees only its secondary significance in relation to the life of the fisherfolk, to whom it is, at once, the means of existence and a perpetual threat of danger. He paints such grandly dramatic pictures as “The Life Line,” “Eight Bells,” “Danger,” “All’s Well,” “Undertow,” “Watching the Tempest,” and “Perils of the Sea”; a series of dramas to which the ocean is the background. How original they are: the subject seen so individually and carving itself out in the artist’s imagination with such incisive force! Moreover, what wholesome breadth in his sympathy! He does not, like Cottet, the eminent painter of the fisherfolk of Brittany, picture the lives of his people as darkened by the pall of an irremediable fatality. He paints them as strong men and women, fronting with strength the vicissitudes of their existence; a point of view entirely akin to his own strong force of character. For here one reaches the tap root of his [Illustration: From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq. THE MAINE COAST. BY WINSLOW HOMER.]