power. It is character: a personal strength; not of the complex kind that diffuses itself over many issues, but self-centred and direct. It is the actuality of things which perpetually seizes his imagination and on which he concentrates for the time being all his energy. And, surely, it is because this is so essentially the quality of present American civilization that he is preëminently the most representative of American painters. He is a product of his time, has sucked nourishment from it, and translated its nobler quality into terms of art. But it is in his marines that he seems to reach the ripest maturity of his genius; and most completely, perhaps, in the “Maine Coast.” The human import of the ocean has spoken home to him at last, in its least local significance. This picture involves a drama; but the players are the elements; the text, of universal language; the theme, as old as time. With the enlargement of purpose has come a corresponding grandeur of style; they realize, as no other marines with which I am acquainted, the majesty, isolation, immensity, ponderous movement and mystery of the ocean, “boundless, endless, and sublime-- The image of Eternity--the throne Of the Invisible.” --They seem to be the spontaneous utterance of a soul full to overflowing with the magnitude of its thoughts. A word must be said of Homer’s skill in water colours. They have the quality of improvisation; snatches of impression, flung upon the paper in the ardour of the moment; tuneful bits of movement and colour, gladsome as the light and quick with the spirit of the occasion; and, being so close to their author’s intention, they have a vigour and directness all his own. VI EDWIN A. ABBEY It was but yesterday, though in this country that is a long time ago, that American painters with the zeal of the neophyte were declaiming against the story-telling picture. Of course, we know that the objection was well taken in regard to a large class of pictures, wherein the story was the “thing,” the way of telling it merely incidental and generally banal. But, like many other good principles pushed to excess, it resulted in a bathos as complete as that from which it would have saved us. Countless canvases have been painted, which possess no human interest and very little artistic justification; the barren issue of a mere negation. Slowly there is coming a reaction, and we are beginning to realize that a painter is none the less an artist for having something to say, may even ultimately depend for his ranking as an artist upon the quality of what he has to say, provided always that he says it in true painter fashion, with reliance, in fact, upon the vocabulary of his own particular art.