But almost everything that he painted is expressive of some phase, at least, of himself. His work is more than ordinarily personal; perhaps, for the reason already mentioned, that he so deliberately concentrated his motives. And the quality of his poetry was lyrical. I have seen it called idyllic, but that is to miss its higher and deeper qualities. The idyl, Tennyson notwithstanding, is too much identified with the little pastoral poem, that breathes the simple gladsomeness of the meadows; but a more serious strain is interwoven with the gentleness and lovableness of Wyant’s muse. He was passionately fond of music and, before his illness, could play the violin, not learnedly, but with true feeling. And the music of his painting is that of the violin; tenderly vibrating, searching home to one’s heart, by turns lightsome, melancholy, caressing, impetuous, but with a tenderness in all. He did not play on many colours, but reaches a subtlety of tone, often as bewildering as it is soothing. The bewilderment will be aroused as much by his shadowed foregrounds as [Illustration: From the collection of George A. Hearn, Esq. MOONLIGHT AND FROST. BY ALEXANDER H. WYANT.] by the faintly luminous sky. They defy analysis and are triumphs of impressionism. Impressionism of the true kind, I mean, pregnant with suggestion and divested of aught that would clog its directness; exhibiting, not knowledge, but the fruit of knowledge, and especially its tact of omission. To the careless and commonplace eye his landscapes have “nothing to them”; approached with a little understanding they mean so much, and the measure of their meaning is the technical knowledge involved. If there were any doubt of this, it could be disposed of by an examination of his earlier work, in which he lets one into the secret of his love of form and construction. Admirably sure and full of character is the drawing of the ground and its features, bit by bit receiving its due share of individuality; so also with the trees and their anatomy of trunk and branches, and with the structure of the sky. Everything has been studied, so that later out of the abundance of his technical skill he could be significantly spontaneous. Yet increase of facility did not lessen the self-exacting conscientiousness of his work. Some of his most impressionistic pictures were the result of trying to reach a fuller exactness of expression; when, finding confusion growing, he would seize another canvas and return to the simplicity of his original thought and let it form itself. Few painters are better represented in their extant works. The fumbled canvas, or the one that, however sketchily, did not attain to his intention, never left the studio, and after his death, Mrs. Wyant, with a fine regard for his memory and with honour to herself, destroyed them. So the real Wyants--for I am told there are sham ones on the market--are invariably worthy.