But he writes, in 1803, a very important letter to his old friend Dunthorne. "For the last two years," he says, "I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performance look like the work of other men. I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me. There is little or nothing in the exhibition worth looking up to. _There is room enough for a natural painter._" He left London accordingly, and worked, in 1804, the whole summer "quite alone among the oaks and solitudes of Helmingham Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage, finding it empty. A woman comes from the farmhouse, where I eat, and makes my bed, and I am left at liberty to wander where I please during the day." And having now returned to the country he became himself again. "Painting," he writes, "is with me but another word for feeling; and I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies upon the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." He had passed his whole youth amid the lovely valleys and luxuriant meadows of Bergholt, where the flocks were at pasture and the beetles hummed; he had wandered about the soft banks of the Stour, in the green woods of Suffolk, amongst old country-houses and churches, farms and picturesque cottages. This landscape which he had loved as a boy he also painted. He was the painter of cultivated English landscape, the portrayer of country life, of canals and boats, of windmills and manor-houses. He had a liking for all simple nature which reveals everywhere the traces of human activity--for arable fields and villages, orchards and cornfields. A strip of meadow, a watergate with a few briars, a clump of branching, fibrous trees, were enough to fill him with ideas and feelings. Gainsborough had already painted the like; but Constable denotes an advance beyond Gainsborough as beyond Crome. Intimate in feeling as Gainsborough undoubtedly was, he had a tendency to beautify the objects of nature; he selected and gave them a delicacy of arrangement and a grace of line which in reality they did not possess. Constable was the first to renounce every species of adaptation and arbitrary arrangement in composition. His boldness in the rendering of personal impressions raises him above Crome. Crome gets his effect principally by his accuracy: he represented what he saw; Constable showed how he saw the thing. While the former, following Hobbema, has an air reminiscent of galleries and old masters, Constable saw the world with his own eyes, and was the first entirely independent modern landscape painter. In his