It was in Albany that he met and married in 1861 Elizabeth Gilbert Davis, a clever woman who afterward developed much literary ability and became well known not only as a reviewer in _The Nation_ and other periodicals but as a novelist and magazine writer. The marriage was altogether fortunate and happy, though at times pecuniary difficulties incident to the artistic and literary life weighed heavily upon them. She was a rod and a staff to comfort him, and there is no record that she ever flinched or failed or regretted her choice. In their early married life there were few trials, she recording that they were fairly prosperous, that he received numerous commissions for pictures, and that they had made many friends. They had stayed on in Albany until the winter of 1862-1863, and then had moved to New York. In 1864 he had a studio in the Tenth Street Building, and his near neighbors were Sandford Gifford, Hubbard, Griswold, J. G. Brown, McEntee, Eastman Johnson, and, later, John La Farge. This was a time of comparatively rapid production with Martin and also a time when many influences might be supposed at work upon him; but in reality none of the influences seems to have made much of an impression. His early work is now infrequently seen, but what there is of it, though small, bright, and a little crude, is nevertheless quite distinctly Martinesque. He had, of course, inherited from the Hudson River school (a name that Professor Mather declares Martin originated) the “view” in landscape. With the panorama had come down the studio method of small detailed treatment, and Martin at first paid it allegiance but he very soon saw its defects. As a boy he could speak of a picture by his master, James Hart, as “a scene of niggled magnitude,” and Mr. Brownell tells me that he had always talked much of “generalization” in landscape. His early pictures show this generalization not so much perhaps in breadth of handling as in breadth of view. He was even then seeing the large elements of earth, air, water, and sky. Naturally enough, his brush was a little fussy with foliage, dead-tree trunks, rock strata, and foreground properties in general; but he could see the unity of mountain ranges, the continuity of air, the omnipresent radiance of light, the great heave of the sky. He already had the vision but not, as yet, the full means of revealing it. It was practically the same nature that Cole and Church had seen, but they saw it in its surface aspect, where Martin saw it in its depth. The difference between them was the wide difference that divides the superficial from the profound.