In 1848, "A Random Shot," one of the artist's most pathetic pictures, was painted. Stephens thus describes it: "It is a snow piece, the scene high on the mountain, whose most distant ridges rise above the mist. The snow lies smooth; and for miles, so far as the eye can penetrate the vapor, there is nothing but snow, which covers, but does not hide, the shapes of the hilltops. A few footprints show that a doe has come hither, attracted, doubtless, by her knowledge of a pool of unfrozen water which would assuage her thirst. Some careless shooter, firing into a herd of deer, had hit the doe, whose fawn was with her, and, mortally wounded, she came to die; the poor fawn had followed. There the victim fell; there the innocent one strove, long after the mothers form was cold, to obtain milk where an unfailing source had been. The mother has fallen on her side; the long limbs, that once went so swiftly, are useless, and the last breath of her nostrils has melted the snow, so that, stained with her blood, the water trickled downwards until it froze again." Monkhouse says, in his "Landseer Studies": "He painted dogs and deer as no man ever painted them before; he inspired one with a humor and both with a poetry beyond all parallel in art; he added to this a feeling for the grandeur and sublimity of nature, which gave to his pictures a charm and a sentiment which all can feel; he never painted anything false or ignoble, vulgar or unmanly; he won as an artist purely the affection and admiration of a whole people as scarcely any man, _not_ a poet, or a soldier, or a statesman, or a philosopher, has ever won them before.... "Landseer may be said to have mastered other animals, but the deer mastered him. He raised dogs almost to the scale of humanity, but deer raised him to a level of higher being. His love for the deer may not have been so deep, but it was more elevating, less self-regarding, and it ended at last in stimulating his imagination to produce pictures deeper in thought and more awful in sentiment than any attempted by an animal painter before." A writer in _Cornhill_ says: "Landseer's perceptions of character were remarkably acute. Not only did he know what was passing in the hearts of dogs, but he could read pretty closely into those of men and women also. The love of truth was an instinct with him; his common phrase about those he estimated highly was that 'they had the true ring.' This was most applicable to himself; there was no alloy in his metal; he was true to himself and to others. This was proved in many passages of his life, when nearly submerged by those disappointments and troubles which are more especially felt by sensitive organizations such as that which it was his fortune--or misfortune--to possess.