Here again is a suggestion of the routine in nature’s scheme: the awakening of day, the following on of the beasts to play their appointed part. And I think we shall be conscious also, for this is a later picture, penetrated with subtlety of manner and meaning, of an extraordinary suggestion of the remoteness of nature at this silent, undisturbed hour. It is a repetition of an occurrence as old as any time we wot of, and it links this modern scene in our imagination with Virgil’s “Eclogues,” with Homer’s “Odyssey” and the Hebrew Laban’s flocks, forming a link in the endless chain of pastoral recollection, at once the most enduring and most lovable of all our impressions of nature. Nor let us omit to notice the remarkable technical skill involved in the painting of this stretch of meadow, the exquisite gradations of tone in the silvered greens as they recede from the eye, the delicate stir of animation in the grass, and also in the painting of the sky, which is kept so surely behind the trees, while its gathering volume of light steals gently through them. So complete is the unity of the picture, so musical its vibration, that from the whole scene there seems to exhale a delicate sigh that floats through the fragrant soundlessness of awakening nature. Such technical accomplishment is the outcome of Walker’s penetrating earnestness. Like most of the best landscape painters of every country, he is entirely self-taught. The appeal of nature, to one who is a true lover of it, is so personal that no other man’s method will avail to express what he feels. He is compelled to discover his own way of utterance, conforming in its individuality to the particular quality of his sincerity. With Walker the sincerity is characterized not only by a determination to reach the truth, but by an instinct for the larger kinds of truth, those which need no enforcing, but make their own significance slowly and surely recognized. Nothing is more conspicuous in his best work than the reserve with which everything is stated. He puts forth his strength with calculated orderliness, gradually letting one into the heart of his meaning, continually stimulating and rewarding by further study, and leaving one at last with the consciousness that he has held back part of what he had in mind. He leads one, indeed, to the dim border land where one says good-by to facts and yields only to the imagination. In this respect he is nearer to Israels than to Millet in his attitude toward peasant life. The peasant of Gruchy was so profoundly impressed with the pitifulness of the peasant’s life that his story of labour with all its force is a restricted one. He missed its nobler aspect in relation to the universal scheme, and feels only its heavy fatalism. Israels has a wider sympathy, which can discover beauty in the monotonous routine, the beauty of little observances well and faithfully done, and the quiet intervals of rest and homely joy that intervene.