Page:François-Millet.djvu/60

 echo in him. Robert Burns, for whom he had a close fellow-feeling—Montaigne, Bernard Palissy, O. de Serres, Poussin's letters and Bernardin de St Pierre. Thus his literary knowledge was solid and essentially classical. He drew from it his sanity of mind, his balance and that calm manliness which detesting sentimentality, simper and inflation, speaks simply, soberly and strongly.

Much deeper than the impressions received from books must have been those made upon the boy Millet by nature. He has written his recollections of his early childhood cradled by the hum of spinning wheels, the noises of geese and cocks, the throb of the flail amid the grain, the church bells and ghost stories. His home, the picture of which he exhibited in the Salon of 1866, was a large thatched building of rough stones standing exposed to all the winds at the edge of a cliff and neighboured by an aged and stunted elm-tree. The sea was a 42