enthusiasm which Cole aroused among his contemporaries, his influence seems to have been to give dignity to landscape art rather than to impress his thoughts and methods on other artists. It is true that he seized the characteristics of our scenery with a truth which came not only from close study, but also from deep affection for the land whose mountains and lakes he painted, and thus led our first landscapists to observe the great variety and beauty of their own country. But, on the other hand, a certain hardness in his technique probably rendered him less influential as a leader than Doughty and Durand. The former, if inferior in general capacity to Cole, was more emphatically the artist by nature. [Illustration: "DESOLATION."--[FROM "THE COURSE OF EMPIRE," BY THOMAS COLE.]] Thomas Doughty was in the leather business until his twenty-eighth year, when, without any previous training, he threw up the trade, and adopted the profession of landscape-painter. There is an audacity, a self-confidence, in the way our early painters entered on the art career, without instruction in the theory and practice of their art, which is charming for the simplicity it shows, but would tend to bring the efforts of these artists into contempt if the results had not often justified their audacity, for they were sometimes men of remarkable ability. There have been many greater landscape-painters than Doughty, but few who have done so well with such meagre opportunities for instruction. He seems, also, to have been successful in attracting favorable notice in England as well as here, although at a time when English landscape art was at its zenith. The soft, poetic traits, the tender, silvery tones, that distinguished Doughty's style, were entirely original with him, and have undoubtedly had much influence in forming the style of some of the landscapists who succeeded him. In Asher B. Durand, a Huguenot by descent, and the only one of the three founders of American landscape-painting who survives to our time to enjoy a green old age, we find a nature as strong as that of Cole. The equal of that artist in the sum of his intellectual powers, we discover in him a different quality of mind. Similar as they are in high moral purpose and a profound reverence for the Creator, as represented in his works, Cole was the most imaginative and inspirational of the two, stirred more by the fire of genius; while Durand, with a more equable temperament and a larger experience, produced results that are more satisfactory from an art point of view. [Illustration: A STUDY FROM NATURE.--[A. U. DURAND.]]