With a select public, however, La Farge had already won recognition. His landscapes and flower pictures--especially the latter with their lovely color, texture, and surface, and that indefinable feeling that is La Farge--met with appreciation from artists and amateurs. The Academy of Design elected him to its membership, and, a little later, a firm of Boston publishers began publishing some of his illustrations made for Browning’s poems. He had planned some three hundred drawings for Browning, and for an edition of the Gospels many more. These were La Farge’s romantic days, and the influences of French romanticism intellectually and his Japanese prints technically were rather strong with him. In fancy he was harking back to Greek and mediæval myths, Bible legends, and Arabian Nights tales. But only a few drawings from each field finally found their way into print. They appeared in the old _Riverside Magazine_ and were accounted very effective, even after the engraver had translated them. Every one who has written about La Farge has devoted a page or so to an analysis of his “Wolf Charmer” and “Piper of Hamelin.” Criticised they were for what has been declared faulty construction and drawing but never for their lack of life. They were excellent examples of naturalistic drawing wherein accuracy is often sacrificed to vitality. But the telling quality of the illustrations was not so much their technique as their imagination. La Farge had inner as well as outer vision, and the conception of the wolf charmer, for example, as half-wolf himself, gnawing rather than playing his pipe, was perhaps the better part of its excellence. But illustration was to engage his attention for only a short period. He was interested in things of larger decorative significance. Describing one day some work of art that I cannot now recall he used the word “decorative” and I remember his pausing and saying rather emphatically in parenthesis: “And when I say decorative, I am saying about the best thing I can about a picture.” Imagination he had in abundance, but perhaps it was manifested stronger in the light and color of his decorations than in such literary readings as the “Wolf Charmer.” His glass was the finest flight in color of modern times. It remains so to this day. The same creative sense of hue on a large scale was shown in his mural work. His panels and lunettes have their individual meaning and their imaginative presentation of the type, but these are only parts of a whole which carries again by its decorative color sweep.