said to me of one of my studies, that it was a subject he would not have dared attack on account of the difficulty of the effect of light, for to me it was simply a question of time and sticking to it. It was not art, but the public did not know it any more than I did, and I was admitted to a place which I believe was one of the highest amongst my contemporaries at home in a way that led to little even in its complete success. I influenced some of my contemporaries and gave a jog to the landscape painting of the day, and there it ended, through a diversion of my ambition to another sphere, but there it must have ended; even if I had never been so diverted. CHAPTER VII ON A MISSION FOR KOSSUTH The arrival, in December, 1851, of Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, on his mission for the redemption of Hungary, set all America in a flame of shallow enthusiasm, and I went to hear his appeals. What he asked for was money to arm his country, to renew the struggle with the House of Hapsburg. His eloquence carried away all deliberation in the Northern States, and even shook the government at Washington; but, in the end, the only practical result was his gain of the dollars which the hearers paid to hear him speak, and which no one regretted who heard him, for such oratory no one in the country ever had heard, even from men to whom the English language was native. Before making his discourse in any town, he took the pains to find out something of the local history, and thus touched the patriotism of his audience in the parish bounds, and the past glories of America were revived in terms of a new and strange flattery. We were like the Athenians after hearing the Philippics of Demosthenes,--all ready to march against the Austrian. Before he left New York I had volunteered to fight or conspire, or take any part in the struggle which might fall to me. I kept my counsel from my family, and when Kossuth went on his westward tour it was settled that, on or after his return to Europe, I was to follow.