To finish by bringing up the name which I have hitherto kept back, the exception, about which some time ago I promised to tell you: the sweetest, tenderest, mightiest art soul that ever was chained inside a mortal body, and prompted the fingers to move as it wanted; the purest, saddest mind that ever writhed neglected and found its reward so late, the soul now free and stirring up a crowd with its pathetic activity, to be like it pure and true--I mean _Jean-Francois Millet, the French peasant painter_. Mr. Hunt says of him, 'For years Millet painted beautiful things, and nobody looked at them. They fascinated me, and I would go to Barbizon and spend all the money I could get in buying his pictures. I brought them to Boston. _"What is that horrid thing?" "Oh, its a sketch by a friend of mine!"_ Now he is the greatest painter in Europe.' That is a painter's verdict about a painter. One of his pictures is vivid in my mind just now. There is a print of it in that wonderful illustrated magazine, 'Scribner's Monthly,' where engravings look like paintings or idealised photographs. It is called 'The Sower,' the dim figure of a labourer scattering seed over a ploughed field with one hand, and holding his apron filled with embryo life in the other. In the distance, and lighted up by the sun, a team of bullocks are dragging the plough, and a flight of birds over beyond the seed. That is the whole composition put into bald words. But as it has been rendered by this painter, it is an embodiment of all which I have tried to explain, the spirit and body of living, working, suffering nature. What would I not give (if I had it) to see a photograph done like that! and it can be done if you labour enough, know enough, and feel enough. 'The Sower!' As I look upon it I am drawn into it, mesmerised and rendered clairvoyant. I am _en rapport_ with the freed spirit which has left along with the delicate aroma of its departing wings a portion of its own personality, its own immortality--vague and tender--greater than Raphael, or Rembrandt, or Albert Dürer, for it has taken the deepest root within humanity. Tenderly I look upon it, not too boldly, for it seems vibrating with a sensuous existence; it clutches at my heart--sinews as it reveals the parables of Christ, accompanied by sobbing notes of melancholy spirit-music; the far-off strikings of angel harp-strings, indefinite but ravishing.