There was nothing new about that to La Farge, but he acquiesced in it by bowing and smiling a little, especially over Ruskin, for whom he came as near having contempt as for any one. Not only Ruskin’s ideas but his vehemence of style were not to La Farge’s fancy. He wrote in no such hectic vein in his _Considerations on Painting_. The whole treatise is an inquiry, not an argument, and through it all you feel the evenly poised, well-balanced mind that is weighing the question and is not to be stampeded by rhetoric or eloquence of any kind. He was too intelligent for enthusiasm or emotion. He thought out everything very calmly, and in the midst of conviction often doubted or questioned his own conclusions. It was his normal attitude of mind--a mind that indulged in subtleties, that saw as many meanings in a problem as a rug-weaver’s eye sees colors in a pattern of tapestry. It was the attempt to put these subtleties in parenthesis that sometimes makes his _Considerations on Painting_ hard reading, and yet no one would wish them deleted. They are side-lights that illumine the quest. The book is an epitome of La Farge’s method of thinking and is a type of its kind in literature as truly as his “Paradise Valley” is a type in painting. As for the philosophic mind, he practically describes himself in one passage in an article in _Scribner’s Magazine_[10] on the “Teaching of Art.” It is worth quoting: “The noblest of all the gifts of the great institutions of learning is a certain fostering of elevation of mind. It is not so much by what he knows that the man brought under the trainings of the great academies is marked; it is by his acquaintance with the size of knowledge; with, if I may say so, the impossibility of completing its full circle; with the acquaintance of the manners of enlarging his boundaries; with the respect of other knowledge than his own; with a certain relative humility as compared with the narrower pride of him who knows not the size of the spaces of the world of knowledge. And such an attitude of mind, such an elevation above petty prides, such a belief in something larger than one’s self, such an openness to the world, is the privilege of a full artistic development.” [10] _Scribner’s Magazine_, vol. 64, page 181.