My study with Church lasted one winter, and showed me that nothing was to be hoped for from him, and that the most intimate superficial acquaintance with nature did not involve the perception of her more intimate relation with art. I learned from him nothing that was worth remembering, but I made acquaintance with a young portrait painter, who had a studio in the same building, an Irishman named Boyle, a pupil of Inman, whose ideas of art were of a far higher order, and to my intercourse with him during that winter and the following summer, which we spent together sketching in the valley of the Mohawk, I owe the first clear ideas of what lay before me in artist life. At Church's studio I met Edgar A. Poe, a slender, nervous, vivacious, and extremely refined personage. But at that juncture I came across "Modern Painters," and, like many others, wiser or otherwise, I received from it a stimulus to nature worship, to which I was already too much inclined, which made ineffaceable the confusion in my mind between nature and art. Another acquaintance I made that winter was of great importance in developing my technical abilities--that of a well-known amateur of New York, afterwards a professional artist, Dr. Edward Ruggles, a physician whose love of painting finally drove him out of medicine. He had the most catholic and correct taste I had then met, and he introduced me to William Page, the most remarkable portrait painter in many respects America has ever produced, whose talks on art used to make me sleepless with enthusiasm. Page was the most brilliant talker I ever met, and a dear friend of Lowell. Returning to Schenectady the following summer, I made my first direct and thorough studies from nature, and amongst these was one, a view from my window across gardens and a churchyard with the church spire in the distance; a small study which incidentally had a most potent effect on all my later life. It was bought in the autumn by the Art Union of New York, and on the proceeds, thirty dollars, the first considerable sum of money I had ever earned, I decided to go to Europe and see what the English painters were doing. Of English art I then knew only directly the pictures of Doughty, an early artistic immigrant from England, and, as afterwards appeared to me, a fair example of the school which had its lead from Constable, to whom he had, however, no resemblance except in choice of motive. He had a comprehension of technique possessed by none of our home painters--a rapid and masterly execution with a scale of color limited to cool grays, but, within this gamut, of exquisite refinement. Constant repetitions of the same motive wore out his welcome on the part of the American public, but his pictures had a charm which was long in losing its power over me, and had an influence in determining me to go to England at the first opportunity. But to see Turner's pictures was always the chief motive, and was the one which decided me to go.