scientifically by the use of semi-transparent window curtains. However this may be, it is undoubtedly true that he did rely upon the effect actually before him and that he sought to represent the subdued effect in his studio or the gentle light of evening so beautifully described by him in his “Ten O’Clock.” It would be difficult to imagine a more beautiful pen picture than this description by Whistler. It indicates his love for the gentle and harmonious qualities in nature. “When the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairyland is before us--then the wayfarer hastens home; the workingman and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master--her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.” [SN: _Abbott Thayer_] This power to select and represent the beautiful qualities in nature, a power which is the result of repeated efforts, has been defined by Abbott H. Thayer with rare skill and poetic beauty. “It is as though a man were shown a crystal, a perfect thing, gleaming below depths of water--far down beyond reach. He would dive and dive again, driven by his great desire to secure it, until finally, all dripping, he brought it up. But that in the end he could bring it--a perfect thing--to us, was possible solely because he had first seen it, gleaming there. Others might dive and dive, might work and labor with endless patience and endless pain, but unless they had first seen the crystal--unless they had been given this divine gift of seeing--this vision--they would come up empty-handed. The occasional so-called genius does not make the crystal, but he alone sees it, where it lies gleaming below depths of water, and by his effort brings it to us. The whole question is how absolutely, how perfectly, the artist sees this vision.” “After the artist has lived, for a certain period, in worship of some particular specimen or type of the form of beauty dearest to him, this crystal-like vision forms, clearer and clearer, at the bottom of his mind, which is, so to speak, his sea of consciousness, until at last the vision is plainly visible to him, and the all-strain and danger-facing time has come for putting it into the form in which as one of the world’s treasures it is to live on.” When asked whether the artist has ever been granted a vision of any beauty which is not based upon the beauty of nature, Thayer exclaimed emphatically, “No, no, no! I don’t see the slightest material for any such conception.”