Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/46

 34 George Fuller.

call him away from his chosen life, and them the spaciousness of its meadows, he obeyed its summons without hesita- the inviting slope of its low hills, the tion. Moreover, he loved the country calm grandeur of its encircling moun- and the family homestead, and may tains, the mysterious gloom and whole- have perceived, also, that the condition some brightness of its changing skies, of art in Boston and New York was not the atmosphere of history and romance such as to encourage an original pur- which is its breath and life. Song and pose, and that, if he was ever to gain story have found many incidents for success, he must develop himself in treatment in this locahty. Not far from quiet, and aloof from the distracting the farm where Fuller's daily work was influences of other methods and men. done, the tragedy of Bloody Brook It is easy to perceive, with the complete was enacted ; the fields which he tilled record of his life before us, that this have their legend of Indian ambuscade experience of labor and thought upon and massacre ; the soil is sown, as with the Deerfield farm, although at first dragon's teeth, with the arrow-heads sight forming an hiatus in his career, and battle-axes of many bitter conflicts ; was really its most pregnant period, and even to the ancient house where, in that without it the Fuller who is now so recent years, the painter's summer much admired might have been lost to easel was set up, a former owner was us, and the spirit that appears in his brought home with the red man's bul- later works never have been awakened, let in his breast. The menace of It is, indeed, a spirit that can find no midnight attack seems even now to the congenial dwelling-place in towns, but wanderer in the darkness to burden makes its home in the fields and on the the air of these mournful meadows, and hillsides, to which the poet-painter, tradition shows that here were felt the depressed but not cast down by his ripples of that tide of superstitious experience of life, repaired to work frenzy which flowed from Salem through and dream. For sixteen years, in the all the early colonies. No place could midst of the fairest pastoral valley of have furnished more potent suggestions New England, he lived in the contem- to the art-idealist than this, and al- plation of the ideas that had passed though it did not lead him to paint its across his mind in the quiet of tragic history (for no man had less European galleries, and now became Hking for violence and passion than more definite impressions. The secret he), it impressed him deeply with its of those years, with their deep, slow concurrent records of endurance and current of refined and melancholy devotion. Nor did it invite him, as* it thought, is now sealed with him in might have done in the case of a eternal sleep ; but from the works that weaker man, into mere description, but remain to us as the matured fruits of having aroused his thought, it submitted his life, we may gain some hint of his itself wholly to the treatment of his experiences. It is not to be questioned strong and original genius. He ap- that he drew from the New-England proached his task with a broad and soil that he tilled, and the air that he comprehensive vision, and a loving and breathed, an inspiration which never inquiring soul. He was not satisfied failed him. The flavor of the quiet with the revelation of his eyes alone, valley fills all his canvases. We see in but sought earnestly for the secret of

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