The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

mperament, to whose unrest fate had given other motives for change than his occupation. He was an Englishman by the name of John Wilson, a pupil of the broth

nd his chief occupation at that time was teaching it wherever at any school he could form a class. He came to Union College, to this end, and had been recommended to my mother for board and lodging, and she gladly availed herself of the opportunity to get for me lessons in drawing in return for his board. He was a constitutional reformer, a radical as radicalism was then possible, had become an atheist with Robert Dale Owen, indignant at the treatm

and myself lasted through his life, and a truer example of the artistic nature never came under my study. All that he knew of painting he got from books, save for an annual visit to the exhibition of the American Academy at New York, but his conception of the nature of art was very lofty and correct, and had his education been in keeping with his natural gifts, he would have taken a high position as a painter. His was one of the most pathetic lives I can recall-a fine sensitive nature, full of the enthusiasms of the outer world, with rare gifts in the embryonic state and mental powers far above the average, limited in every direction, in facilities, in edu

e nature than art that evoked my enthusiasms, and that in art I felt mainly the expression of the love of the beauty of nature. Sexton gave me some idea of the use of oils, and from that time most of my leisure hours and my vacant days were given to painting

American painter. He was a curious result of the influence of the old masters on a strongly individual English mind, inclined to nature worship, born in England in the epoch of the poetic English school to which Girtin, Turner, and their colleagues belonged, and migrating to America in boyhood, early enough to become impressed by the influence of primitive nature as a subject of art. Self-taught in technique and isolated in his development, he became inevitably devoted to the element of s

nly rival of Cole, though in a purely naturalistic vein, and a painter of real power in a manner quite his own, which borrowed, however, more from the Dutch than from the Italian feeling, to which Cole inclined. Durand was originally an engraver of the first order, and afterwards a portrait painter, but his careful painting from nature and a sunny serenity in his rendering of her marked him, even in the absence of imaginative feeling, as a specialist in landscape, to which he later gave himself entirely. His was a serene and beautiful nature, perfectly reflected in his art, and he fir

of tree, rock, or cloud was unsurpassed by the work of any landscape painter whose work I know, and everything he knew he rendered with a rapidity and precision which were simply inconceivable by one who had not seen him at work. I think that his vision and retention of even the most transitory facts of nature passing before him must have been at the maximum of which the human mind is capable, but he had no comprehension of the higher and broader qualities of art. His mind seemed a camera obscura in which everything that passed before it was recorded permanently, but he added in the rendering of its record nothing which sprang from human emotion, or which involved that rem

ummer, 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

ed, 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 exe

of the children of the Children's Crusade, with an unfaltering faith that I should be led and cared for by Providence as I had been by my parents. I had no apprehension, from the moment that one of the ship-owners who was in business relations with my elder brother offered me a free passage on one of his sailing ships to Liverpool, that I should not find a similar bridge back again; and with my thirty dollars changed into six sovereigns, and a little valise with only a change of clothes, I went on board the Garrick, a packet of the Black Ball line, sailing in the last days of December, 1849. There had been a thaw and the Hudson River was full of floating ice, which in the ebbing of the tide endangered the shipping lying out in the stream, and the captain made such haste to get out of

ratic government was destined to be a failure. We had hot debates on the subject, in which the doctor adduced his conversations with the intelligent farmers of New England, whom he had especially studied, to show that their political education was such as to endanger the best interests of the community from its extreme superficiality; I, with an unfaltering faith in the processes of universal suffrage, disputed his conclusions

f illimitable freedom in space, with no reminder of anything beyond, was sufficient for me. I used to lie on my back on the roof of the wheel-house and look into the sky, and try to make friends with the sea-gulls which sailed around over me, curiously peering down with their dove-like eyes as if to see what this thing might be. Then the nights, so luminous with the "breeming" of the sea as we got into the Gulf Stream, and the flitting and sudden population of the ocean, always bringing us surprises; the more exciting and d

(for I went to the "captain's hotel"), and thus I succeeded in getting to London with the money which was to have paid my expenses for six weeks (according to the careful calculations I had made, at the rate of a pound a week) reduced to provision for three, after which Providence was expected to provide me with a passage home. In these weeks I had planned to see