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belongs to the earlier days Matthew Arnold

tells of:

"O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily on the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life

With its sick hurry, its divided aims,

Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts, was rife."

In fact, strange as it may appear, his way of looking at life seems more akin to that of the Greeks of old. They did not in their art worry over the meaning of things they could not understand. A beautiful thing was a joy to them; to the artist in its production, to the observer in his contentment with simply beholding and enjoying it.

"If eyes were made for seeing,

Then beauty is its own excuse for being."

That was their way of looking at nature, and it is that also of William Maris. He is unlike them in showing us his own personal feelings in his pictures, which he very certainly does; but his happy and contented mental outlook belongs more to the past.

We gather, from his evident regard for living

"The

Scholar

Gypsy."

"The
Rhodora."
R. W.
Emerson.

"Song of Myself."

creatures, that he would agree with Walt
Whitman:

"I think I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not lie awake in the dark, and weep
for their sins,

Not one is dissatisfied

Not one is respectable, or unhappy over the

whole earth."

Yes! William Maris has also looked at them "long and long"; and he has now, through close study, and thorough acquaintance with their every mood, the power of reproducing them on canvas, with a few broad strokes of his brush, yet giving their very anatomy and construction, as these appear to the eye.

When we wish to escape from the "eternal sadness" so much about us, and which perhaps finds too much expression in art, we turn with joy to William Maris and his happy and healthy ideas of life, and from his sunny pastures and cool ponds there is wafted to us a breath of refreshing country air that brings peace and comfort in its train.

Like that of his fellow-artists, his work has

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grown broader as the years have passed by; and the beauty, strength, and decision of his recent work are the result of the knowledge and skill to which he has attained, after years of earnest working in his favourite pursuit. He is to-day the first of living landscape artists who paint cattle, and it is safe to predict that he will stand in the future in the front rank of the animal painters of the world.

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