YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

tJ%lo??t,cc/ic0JUZltul:fy^

The
Life and Letters
of
SAMUEL PALMER
Painter and Etcher
WRITTEN AND EDITED BT
A. H. Palmer
Illustrated

LONDON

Published by Seeley & Co., Limited
Essex Street, in the Strand, 1892

CONTENTS

Preface . . ...
List of Illustrations 
The Life of Samiel Palmer .
The Letters of Samuel Palmer ro-
Barlow, Mr. T. O., R.A.
Calvert, Mr. E.

Clergyman, a young
Cope, Mr. C. W., R.A.

George, Mrs.

Gilchrist, Mrs. A. .

Giles, Mr. John . . .
,, Mr. Samuel .
Hamerton, Mr. P. G.

I'ACI.
xi
xv
1-170
CHI.
September
3°
1876
365
X.
October
9
1838
194
XIII.
July
25
1848
211
XXII.
,,
n
1861
230
LXVI.
February
1869
298
XXVII.
June
1862
237
XXVIII.
.1
21
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239
XX XIV.
February
1863
252
LXXXIII.
September
1872
32S
CXX.
July
27
1880
388
XX1II.
November
2
1861
¦ 230
XXV.
March
IO
1862
• 232
LXX.
October
1870
3°7
XXIV.
December
9
1861
23'
XXIX.
June
27
1862
240
XXX.
,,
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243
XXXI.
September
)»
247
XXXIII.
January
1863
251
Lxnr.
May
1 868
• 294
XI.
October
28
1838
201
LXXIV.
J»iy
8
1871
314
CONTENTS.
Hamerton, Mr. P. G. continued

Hook, Mr. B.
,, ., •
Hook, Mr. J. C, R.A.
», ,,
Linnell, Mr. John .
Palmer, A. H. .

Palmer, T. M. .
Redgrave, Mr. R., R.A.

Redgrave, Mrs. R.
Redgrave, Miss Frances

Reed, Mr. John

LXXV.

October

1871 .

PAGE 316

LXXIX.

January

26

1872 .

322

LXXXII.

August

S>

327

LXXXVIII.

November

ft

333

LXXXIX.

November

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XCII.

February

1874 -
343
C.
November
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August
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9)
377
CXIII.
October
13
91
378
LXXIII.
June
1871
3H
CXXVII.
March
26
1881
401
XXXV.
May
1863 .
253
CXXI.
August
13
1880
390
I.
December
21
1828
173
II.
May
17
1829
177
LIV.
October
14
1866 .
282
LV.
November
4
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LXI.
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292
LXXXT.
June
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XIX.
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XLVII.
July
14
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LIII.
October
1
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281
CH.
March
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363
LXII.
November
16
1867
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L.
July
6
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277
LXVIII.
September
1869 .
305
CI.
January
1876 .
36x
XV.
,,
26
1858 ,
216
XXI.
1861
22S
CONTENTS

Richmond, Mr. G., R.A,

Richmond, Mr. & Mrs. G. .
Richmond, Mr. John . .
Richmond, Miss Julia {see
Robinson)
Richmond, Miss Laura
Richmond, Messrs. W. & J.
Robinson, Mrs. (see Rich
mond, Miss Julia) ...
Seeley, Mr. R.
, , ,» •
Stephens, Mr. F. G.

Twining, Miss Louisa

-Valpy, Mr. L. R.

EN IS.

vii

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¦835
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IX.
September
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1838 .
193
LXXV1II.
November
1871 .
320
HI.
September
1 866
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XXXII.
1862
1865
248
270
XLV.
April
XCI.
December
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213
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October
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264
CXVI.
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XXXVII.
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XXXVIII.
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257
XXXIX.
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XL.
October
) j
261
CONTENTS.
Valpy, Mr L. R. continued

Wilkinson, Miss

Williams, Dr. W.
Williams, Mr. W.

XLI.

November

1864

262

XLIII.

February

1865

267

XLIV.

, ,

3 '

268

XLVI.

June

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272

XLVIII.

December

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274
XLIX.
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275
Ll.
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LVII.
September
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289
LVIII.
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289
LIX.
October
21
13
290
LX.
November
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>)
291
LXIV.
September
1868
296
LXVII.
March
16
1869
304
LXXI.
December
13
1870
3C9
LXXII.
January
1
1871
310
LXXVI.
LXXVII.
November
11
318 320
XC.
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1872
340
XCV.
February
1
1875
352
XCVIII.
May
>,
356
XCIX.
,,
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358
ex.
September
S
1878
374
CXXV.
February
16
1881
395
Extracts from Letiers to-
397
XVI.
May
1858
218
XVII.
September
17
1858 ,
219
XXVI.
May
29
1862
233
XII.
March
iS
1839
209
CXVII.
December
26
1879
¦ 384
CXVIII.
11
• 385
CXIX.
July
20
1880
• 387
A Catalogue of the exhibited Works and the Etchings of Samuel
Palmer 405

PREFACE
About ten years ago, when I was writing a short memoir of my father,
it occurred to me that a companion volume of his letters might be
published. I knew that many of these were preserved by his friends,
and esteemed not only on account of regard for the writer, but for what
was thought considerable originality. Yet I was not prepared for the
extent of the collection which was most courteously placed at my
disposal, carrying with it, by virtue of its very existence, the evidence
of some merit. The publication of the volume was postponed ; but
the delay was by no means unfortunate, inasmuch as it gave me
leisure to sift the material and reject that which was unsuitable, while
applying myself, at the same time, to a closer and more unprejudiced
study of my father's life.
There being an analogy between writing dashed off, for the most
part, without the slightest thought of publicity, or of literary precision,
and rapid sketches from nature done with a purpose and a will, I
thought there would be as much danger in tampering in the one case
as there always is in the other, and that it would be best to leave
the selected letters to stand or fall on their own merits, without the
manipulation such collections have sometimes received. Nevertheless
I deemed it well to omit passages that were of no interest whatever
except to my father's correspondents, the omissions being indicated in
the usual way. A few explanatory comments were necessary ; but I
compressed these within the narrowest possible bounds. I was unable
to fill up the gap between the years 1839 and 1848, having no letters of
any interest at my disposal written within that period. Should any such
exist I should be grateful for the loan of them.
As time went on, I became more and more impressed by the
inadequacy and unworthiness of the memoir I have mentioned (a tyro's

xii PREFACE.
work, superficial, and in some respects misleading), and I thought it
would be well to accompany the letters with a new biography which
should be more worthy of its subject, and which, above all things,
should be true. I therefore began a careful study of all my father's
memoranda, artistic and otherwise ; of his numerous old pocket-books,
his business papers, and particularly of what I will call (for want of
a better term) his shorthand notes from nature. These consisted in
innumerable little blots and scratches and hastily scribbled hints or
impressions, which, slight as they were, bore a far more important part
in the artist's professional career and in the growth of his best works
than might be supposed.
Many of the rejected letters contained, like the memoranda, passages
of biographical or artistic interest, and I decided to quote these passages
freely, that, even at the risk of an appearance of patch-work, my father's
story might be told as far as possible in his own words.
To those who have read the old life I wish to commend the new,
because the relations of the two may be compared to the relations of
a somewhat inaccurate and meagre table of contents to any work and
the work itself. Even my father's most intimate friends will find that
there is something to be learned of his career which is new to them,
for much that I have quoted no eyes but his own ever saw before,
while of those struggles with adversity which did so much to shape
and to ripen his character, few persons knew the full extent.
When the manuscript of the Life and Letters was finished I availed
myself of the valuable help of Mr. Allan J. Hook, to whose just and
pertinent criticisms I consider myself very greatly indebted.
The list of my father's exhibited works and etchings I believe to be
fairly accurate and complete ; and for this completeness I am much
beholden to Mr. F. G. Stephens and Mr. Allan J. Hook, who kindly
searched the Royal Academy and some other catalogues. For the list
of the works exhibited by the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours
I am responsible myself.
The illustrations in this volume were chosen with some difficulty, and
with the advantage of Mr. Seeley 's advice, from a large mass of material.
As much of my father's work is most difficult to render by any photo
graphic method, we thought it well to choose such examples as could

PREFACE. xiii
be dealt with with some prospect of success, and which at the same
time should be fairly representative.
The portrait is a reproduction of a life-size stump drawing which,
as the crude work of a student, will perhaps escape very harsh criticism.
It is given as the only portrait in existence showing my father at that
age — an age when, mentally, he was in the prime of life.
The device upon the cover is taken from the statue of Endymion in
the British Museum. This beautiful figure is mentioned by my father (by
the name of " The Sleeping Mercury ") as a test of taste and of the
imaginative faculty. See the Letters, pages 183 and 261.
A. H. Palmer.
Tilford, Surrey. October, 1891.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Samuel Palmer, aged 63. From a Chalk Drawing by A. II.
Palmer . .... .... Frontispiece
The Willow. An original Etching by Samuel Palmer, executed on his admission
to the Etching Club, 1850 . .  page 2
In Lullingstone Park, near Shoreham. Pencil Sketch from Nature . 44
Ruth returned from Gleaning. Monochrome Design. Shoreham. Ex
hibited at the Royal Academy 1S29 . .  48
The Bright Cloud. Monochrome Design. Shoreham . . 48
Villa D'Este. A Water-colour Sketch from Nature  . . 60
Vesuvius 1838. One of a series of Water-colour Sketches of the Mountain as
seen from Pompeii while in eruption . . . 70
A Storm on the Cornish Coast. A Water-colour Sketch, from which was
taken the motive of ll'nrivJ at Home, exhibited in 1862 . . 70
The Water-mill. Water-colour Drawing known to the Artist as The Margate
Mottle. See Life, page 88  88
Mouth Mill, near Clovelly. Pencil Sketch from Nature 106
Clovelly Park. ,, ,, . 106
A Churchyard Yew. Sketch from Nature . 122
Designs at Shoreham. Sepia . . 172
Tintern Abbey. Water-colour Sketch from Nature 188
Florence. ,, ,, . . 206
Pele Point, Land's End. Pencil Sketch from Nature . . ..... 212
A Study of Sea. Cornwall. ,, ....  212
A Pifferaro. Water-colour Sketch from Life  . 234
Crossing the Brook. A Water-colour Drawing. Unfinished  266
In Clovelly Park. A Sketch from Nature, in Chalk and Coloured Crayons 322
The Capitol. Water-colour Sketch from Nature  ... 344
A Kentish Hop Garden. Shoreham. Pen and Ink. In the text ... .405
Crickets. A Study from Life. Chalk, ,,  422

THE LIFE OF
SAMUEL PALMER

X

THE LIFE OF
SAMUEL PALMER

CHAPTER I
1805 TO 1826
Eighty-six years ago Surrey Square, in the parish of St. Mary's Newington,
was not severed by interminable streets from every country association.
From the upper windows might be caught pleasant glimpses of sylvan
Dulwich, and the southerly wind came fresh from many a neighbouring
copse and meadow, long since forgotten.
At that time a young bookseller lived in the Square. His father (a
prosperous City tradesman) was the son of Samuel Palmer, a pluralist
divine of Sussex, and the grandson of Samuel Palmer, a Wiltshire
Rector.1 Although the bookseller could trace his descent still further back, and
no doubt was proud to be able to claim kindred with Richard Hooker (not to
mention a certain Sir Stephen Fox), Fate had denied him the ancestral
orthodoxy. He was, I believe, a Baptist of the strict old school ; and ultimately
obeyed a "call" to exhort the members of a Baptist congregation in Walworth.
His wife, to whom the slightest expression of his decided will was an
unalterable law, had figured as " Lavinia " in a frontispiece designed by
Stothard for some work of her father. This literary gentleman had also
achieved a book on " Domestic Happiness " ; but, as I have always under
stood, he was a domestic martinet of the first water. He had written
books, and the books had been printed, so he was the pride of his family,
who meekly obeyed his orders, and worshipped him (at a very respectful
distance) under the title of " The Author."
On the 27th of January 1805 (the bookseller being then thirty years
old) there was born to him his first child. This was my father who,
1 An inscription and a coat of arms upon an old brass within the altar rails of Wylye
Church, still testify that the Rector's bones lie beneath. He was presented to the living
by Archbishop Wake (whose niece he had married), in 1708, three years before his death.
B 2

4 THE LIFE OF
in due course, was registered at Dr. Williams' library, under his forefathers'
Christian name. Like many first-born children he was supposed to be
delicate, and was the source of needless anxiety, but he always asserted
that he owed his life to the very original gastronomic notions of his young
nurse. She found him pining on pap and other baby diet, and boldly
substituted more substantial and unusual nutriment. However this may
be, he certainly owed to Mary Ward something more than a precocious
appetite for salmon. She was one of those faithful and affectionate
servants of a race which seems to exist no longer, and although for the
most part unlettered she was not only " deeply read " in her Bible, and in
Paradise Lost, but was acquainted with other poetry. For instance, when
the child was between three and four years old, Mary and he stood watching
at a window while the full moon, rising behind the branches of a great elm,
cast a maze of shadows on the opposite wall. As the shadows changed,
the girl repeated this couplet : —
" Fond man ! the vision of a moment made !
Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade ! "
My father never forgot those shadows and often tried to reproduce them
with his pencil. There are not many nurse-maids who are capable of
intelligently quoting poetry to such purpose as to fix an incident like this
permanently in the memory of a baby, and I think it is evident that both
must have possessed a rare faculty.
My paternal grandfather was a methodical, punctilious, and very simple-
minded man, whose words were generally wiser than his actions, the
wisdom being otherwise than worldly. He was not without originality, and
though his natural bent was evidently towards the exact sciences, he had
considerable literary taste. So far from becoming indifferent to the books
with which his trade made him familiar, or regarding them as so much
merchandize troublesome to dust, he seems to have felt for them a deep
regard, unlike that of the mere bibliomaniac, and to have delighted in their
constant presence. Inside the last of his little home made pocket-books
that exists I find these words (written by my father when he gave it me),
"He loved knowledge for its own sake." His letters certainly bear this
out. They are feats of legibility, are sensible, and are sometimes seasoned
with a little dry humour, but they are not the letters of a man who is
likely to be successful in much besides the neat storage of innumerable facts,
gathered indiscriminately.
Considering his boy rather weakly and the fragility a good reason for
deferring his schooling, he determined to lay the foundations of his educa
tion himself, in his own. way. Thus at an exceptionally early age,
the child was encouraged to fall to upon his Greek and Latin, and was

SA ,1/ UE L PA L ME R. 5
allowed at the same time "free pasture through a wide range of English
literature" — literature of such variety, that bigotry does not seem to have
been one of his father's failings. Every day a portion of the Scriptures
was learnt by heart, and every day were repeated with the other lessons,
these words : — " Custom is the plague of wise men, ami the idol of fools."
This was a rather subversive maxim for the nursery, but one for the
learning of which (as I have often he.ird him say) my father had cause
to be thankful all the days of his life. When a son of his own was
beginning his career he gave him this very similar advice, " If we once
" lose sight of goodness as the principal thing we are adrift without an
" anchor. If we merely ask ourselves ' What will people say of us V we are
" rotten at tlie core." It will be presently seen how thoroughly these precepts
were put into practice, even to the verge of fanaticism.
The exceptional eagerness my father showed in following his early
studies caused the months to pass away very pleasantly ; and from time to
time, by way of holiday, he paid visits with his mother to relations at Green
wich and Margate ; this last journey being made, I believe, in one of the
old "Hoys" owned by a distant kinsman. It was in Margate, perhaps,
that his delight in the supernatural had its origin ; weird stories of murder
and of unquiet spirits which roamed in some of the ancient houses being
common. My father never spoke of his childhood as having been unhappy or
dull, but although some young cousins tempted him into a few boyish
pranks, it seems to have lacked the boisterous frolic so essential to the
well-being of children. It was for the most part a sedentary and preco
ciously grave childhood, which proved deleterious to the body, and, for a
time, to the development of a healthy mental condition. It was all very
well to nestle in a corner with his cat " Watch " and a glass of home made
wine, there to pore over the pages of a favourite author, but it was such
habits as these that led to his becoming physically unlike the average English
boy — small of limb, soft handed, and lacking in activity. They also helped
to produce a sensitiveness which he would have been better without, and
a strange liking for shedding " delicious tears " at performances on the
organ. After the birth of a second son, who afterwards received the smatterings
of an artistic education, my father was sent to Merchant Taylors' School
— a life for which he had been carefully unfitted. Before he had begun to
find his level, and to profit by the inestimable advantages of that well-
known process, it was discovered that he had "a taste for art." He tells
us that his parents misinterpreted " an instinct of another kind — a passion-
" ate love (the expression is not too strong), for the traditions and monu-
" ments of the Church ; its cloistered abbeys, cathedrals, and minsters, which

6 THE LIFE OF
" I was always imagining and trying to draw ; spoiling much paper with pen-
" cils, crayons, and water-colours." This might have been an unfortunate
instinct for the elder son of a very earnest Baptist to possess, and it is not
surprising that it was at first "misinterpreted." We have my father's
authority for the fact that he was what he calls " a free-thinker " at
fourteen, and we know that he afterwards became and remained a staunch
churchman. What part, however, my grandfather's arguments and in
fluence may have played in the growth of his son's religious opinions—
whether he opposed them, or simply left them to grow unchecked, I do not
know. No one has realized more thoroughly than my father afterwards did
the priceless value of a liberal education, and the serious responsibility
resting on those who take away the opportunity of acquiring it except
for the gravest reasons. "It is too commonly the case," he wrote,
" that when my young master prefers scribbling over paper to his Latin
and Greek, he is supposed at once to have a 'taste for painting.' " In my
father's instance, the result did not seem to justify the step of removing
him from school. He began his artistic studies heartily, but for want of
proper teaching they were altogether misdirected. Instead of being made
to attack the all-important rudiments of draughtsmanship and anatomy (a
discipline of which he afterwards well knew the value) he was allowed
to copy laboriously, prints of the Campo Santo frescoes, engravings of
" botanical minutiae," and even architectural drawings.
When he was nearly thirteen years old these ill-advised attempts were
interrupted by his first great trouble. He was paying a visit to his grand
father " The Author " early in the year when he was told that his mother
was dead. He had dearly loved her, for he says " she was the counterpart
of her who has charmed us all in Cowper's verse," and the news " pierced
him like a sharp sword." It is doubtful whether he recovered the shock
for many years, and to this cause may be partly attributed a morbid and
melancholy tendency of mind which grew upon him to no small extent,
although its attacks were fortunately intermittent. His capability of suffer
ing in this and other calamities cannot be gauged by his age, or by the
usual standard of susceptibility, but only by his own abnormally sensitive
temperament ; and it will be seen, by and bye, how terrible a scourge that
temperament became.
Father and son were now thrown more together, and they turned for
their recreation to the diligent study of English literature. The bookseller, in
spite of his avowed contempt for custom was, as I have said, a punctilious
man, and he loved to do everything with the orderly deliberation that some
times degenerates into an iron routine. He made himself little vellum-
covered memorandum-books just the size of his waistcoat pocket, and filled

SAMUEL PALMER. 7
them with elaborately written notes, ranging from the solution of an
algebraical problem, to a quotation from some favourite poet or divine. If
the daily walk with his son proved wearisome or unattractive, out amti the
little book to shorten the homeward journey.
The artistic studies were still continued to small purpose, but as it had
been definitely decided that the boy should become a painter he received
some lessons from a Mr. Wate ; an obscure artist, but a man whose sterling
and unostentatious character, together with his methodical habits, impressed
his pupil not a little.
Good news greeted tlie student not as he says himself on his
fourteenth birthday, but just after it, and this was the letter he received.
" Mr. Young presents compliments to Mr. Palmer informing [him] that
" Mr. Wilkinson of No. 4 Beaumont Street, Marylebone has purchased his
" picture No. 169 marked at 7 guineas, and Mr. Wilkinson wishes to see Mr.
" Palmer, being disposed from the specimen he has seen of his abilities, to
" give him further encouragement. British Gallery, Pall Mall. February 2,
" 181 9." 1 In the same year he was represented at the Royal Academy by
three subjects.2 It is less remarkable that so young a tyro should have
tried to grapple with the difficulties of painting from nature and the dif
ficulties of design, than that he should have ventured to send his first
attempts to the leading exhibitions of the day, with encouraging results.
Perhaps we may conclude that crude as these works were, they were not
without sterling qualities which the kindly Academical veterans detected.
But the standard of those days was, of course, quite a different thing from
that of the present time.
The Academy exhibition of 1819 was the first my father had seen, and
he was at once deeply impressed by Turner's Orange Merchantman. This
was the origin of his admiration for the great painter ; and he says that
afterwards, when " Mr. George Cooke the engraver would sometimes drop
" in of an evening for a talk about art, the engravings of the brothers from
" Turner formed part of the pabulum of my admiration — lunacy I may
" almost say, before the popular expositors of that wonderful man were
" born ..." The frame of mind which forced the lad of fourteen to
stop before the Orange Merchantman and to carry away with him such a
vivid impression of that one picture was probably due partly to the kind
of literature in which he had enjoyed " free pasture," and partly to the
same predisposition which fixed the moon-cast shadows in his memory.
Faculties which at that age are generally rudimentary appear to have
been already fairly developed.
1 This picture was either Bridge scene, composition, or Landscape, composition.
" 257. Landscape with ruins ; 259. Cottage scene. Banks of the Thames, Battersea.
414. A study.

Z1-,
%/ THE LIFE OF
In 1820 he was again successful in getting a picture accepted at the
Academy, and we find from the index of the catalogue that the family had
migrated to No. 10, Broad Street, Bloomsbury.
The boy began now to flounder into the deep waters of his profession ;
but he was not altogether without encouragement. It was long before the
days of the westward tide which left the stone stairs and lofty rooms of
Newman Street high and dry on the shores of unfashionable life, and in that
street dwelt Stothard, who must have known something of the family as he
had drawn my grandmother. From Stothard plenty of good advice was
forthcoming, together with occasional tickets of admission to the lectures at
the Royal Academy, where Flaxman then discoursed on sculpture. But
my father was without the healthy emulation of the schools, where he
might have profited by seeing the workmanship of those more experienced
than himself. So, at a time when he should have contented himself with
the alphabet of art, he was full of theories and speculations more suitable
to the most learned professors ; and full also of boyish certainty about
things of which he knew very little. As far as art was concerned he
continued to misuse his days, but at the same time, be it remembered, to
exercise very diligently his mental faculties, till he became acquainted with
Mr. John Linnell, who was his senior by twelve years, and in full career as
a well-known artist. The healthy influence of this remarkable man came
just at the right moment, and I shall presently have to allude to it more
particularly. According to Mr. Richmond the acquaintance arose through
Mr. Linnell admiring some of my father's small sepia landscapes, and it
soon grew into intimacy. The new friend introduced the student to John
Varley and Mulready ; and just as Turner's work had appealed to one
peculiarity of that student's mind Mulready's thoroughness and love of
conscientiousness appealed to a second. As my father wrote afterwards,
Mulready "was one of the few who realized Lavater's advice to devote
ourselves to each new undertaking as if it were our test — our first work
and our last." Mulready's maxims were much to the mind of a youth who,
in spite of his admiration for Turner, was now struggling to imitate the very
texture of the marble statues at the British Museum ; and we shall find
that, in after years, my father handed them on in his own way by harping
on the importance of Patience, Elements, and Accuracy.
He was now about to enter upon the first of the five eras into which
his career naturally divides, by falling under a peculiar influence which
seemed to him almost supernatural. ,
\ My uncle Mr. John Linnell Junr., writing to me touching an erroneous
date in Gilchrist's Life of Blake, says that his father " first became ac-
" quainted with William Blake when he (J. L., Senr.) was living in Rathbone
" Place (1818) to whom he paid a visit with the younger Mr. Cumberland-

SAMUEL PALMER. 9
' Blake lived then in South Molton Street, Oxford Street (2nd floor), and
" J. L. employed him to help him with the engraving of his portrait of Mr.
" Upton, a Baptist preacher. This is stated thus in his autobiography by
" J. L., and the first entry referring to Blake in J. L.'s Journal is dated
"June 24, 1818, when he took Blake the picture of Mr. Upton and the
"copper plate to begin the engraving upon.'' This was the beginning
of an intimate friendship between Blake and Mr. Linnell Senr., and it was
through the latter that, six years later, my father became himself intimate
with Blake, though he had doubtless known his works for some time.
That these works were inspired by the spirit of the purest and noblest art
and were worthy to be ranked with the greatest works of the greatest
masters he soon became convinced, and neither he nor Mr. Linnell
appeared to see in them any other peculiarity.
The first records of my father s acquaintance with Blake occur in 1824,
and that the two friends visited the Academy exhibition of that year to
gether seems probable from a passage in Gilchrist's Life : " Mr. Palmer
" well remembers a visit to the Academy in Blake's company, during which
" the latter pointed to a picture near the ceiling by Wainwright, and spoke of
" it as ' very fine.' . . . ' While so many moments worthy to remain are
" fled,' writes Mr. Palmer to me, 'the caprice of memory presents me with
" the image of Blake looking up at Wainwright's picture ; Blake in his plain
" black suit and rather broad-brimmed, but not Quakerish hat, standing so
" quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself
" thinking " How little you know who is among you.' " According to Gil
christ, this picture was a scene from Walton's Angler, and upon referring
to the Academy catalogue we find it entered thus. "No. 268 The Milk
maid's Song, T. G. WainwTight, H. ' Come live with me and be my love.'
From The Compleat Angler. Isaac Walton and Venator listening.' "
Now my father more than once described a certain interview with Blake
at Fountain Court as a first interview ; but no doubt through his having
mislaid and forgotten the memoranda he made at the time his descriptions
differ. I have been fortunate in finding among his papers the very book in
which the notes (together with some others relating to Blake) were entered,
and, assuming that the incident of the picture is correctly related, we are con
fronted with a difficulty on account of the date assigned to the first interview.
These notes, however, being evidently written very near the time of the
occurrences with which they deal are more likely to be accurate than my
father's recollections many years afterwards. They open as follows : —
" On Saturday, 9th October, 1824, Mr. Linnell called and went with me
" to Mr. Blake. We found him lame in bed, of a scalded foot (or leg).
" There, not inactive, though sixty-seven years old, but hard-working on a bed
" covered with books sat he up like one of the Antique patriarchs, or a

io /' THE LIFE OF
" dying Michael Angelo. Thus and there was he making in the leaves of a
"great book (folio) the sublimest designs from his (not superior) Dante.
" He said he began them with fear and trembling. I said ' O ! I have
"enough of fear and trembling.' 'Then,' said he, 'you'll do.' He de-
" signed them (ioo I think) during a fortnight's illness in bed ! And
" there, first, with fearfulness (which had been the more, but that his designs
" from Dante had wound me up to forget myself), did I show him some of
" my first essays in design ; and the sweet encouragement he gave me (for
" Christ blessed little children) did not tend basely to presumption and
" idleness, but made me work harder and better that afternoon and night.
" And, after visiting him, the scene recurs to me afterwards in a kind of
" vision ; and in this most false, corrupt, and genteelly stupid town my
" spirit sees his dwelling (the Chariot of the sun), as it were an island in the
" midst of the sea— such a place is it for primitive grandeur, whether in the
" persons of Mr. and Mrs. Blake, or in the things hanging on the
" walls. . . ."
The authority of the Academy catalogue for 1824 on the one hand,
and that of my father's notes on the other leave no way of reconciling the
conflicting dates, except by assuming that either he or Gilchrist was in
error as to the title of Wainwright's picture, and that it was one of those
exhibited by that notorious and accomplished criminal in 1825. This is
the more probable because we find that it was not till October 9, 1824,
that my father showed Blake some of his " first essays in design," whereas
there were two works of his x hanging in the very exhibition Gilchrist refers
to — works which he would not be likely to refrain from bringing under his
companion's notice.
I must return to the time preceding these notable events in my father's
life, reminding the reader once more that (as he himself freely acknow
ledged) his early professional career, as far as technical training went, was
very ill-advised. It seems that his artistic feeling and taste were at first strong
and acute, then decadent, and then, temporarily, almost extinguished ; a state
of things probably caused chiefly by this misdirected practice. But all
this time there was a steady intellectual advance— the steady influence of
the best literature upon a mind naturally susceptible to all good influences,
whether moral or poetic. The first crop may have failed, but the soil was
mellowing. Just at the time when a dangerous propensity might have arisen to
wander off on bye roads leading to idleness or pleasant dilettantism there
came upon the scene the decided, uncompromising character of John
Linnell— a courageous artist who had fought many a tough battle, and
1 504. Landscape Twilight; and 706. Study of a Head.

SAMUEL PALMER. n
who knew the dispositions and strength of the enemy, lie w.ns remarkable
for individuality; and happily, he was full of admiration lor some of the old
giants who tower above all the painters of their own and alter times.
" Look at Albert Durer," he said ; and he said it so imperatively that the
words are quoted more than once in my father's early memoranda. He
urged the study of Michael Angelo and Honasoni — the study of the figure,
and particularly of Antique sculpture. His twelve years of seniority went
for a good deal, but not for more than his great strength of character and
originality. All who knew John Linnell intimately must admit that he
belonged to the order of men who, if they fail with one weapon or with
many, coolly and doggedly fight on to victory. His convictions were
strong, deeply rooted, and, as might have been expected from an entirely
self-made man, accompanied by a great intolerance of any convictions of a
contrary kind. He was by nature so painstaking and so extremely in
dustrious that it needed not the precepts of his friend and master
Mulready to turn him towards an honest and sterling professional ideal.
Of this ideal as it existed then some notion may be gathered from his
early engravings in line and mezzotint, after his own pictures ; particularly
' the fine plate after his portrait of John Martin, the stern old Keppel
Street Pastor.1 A reverent regard for truth is shown in every touch, and
those essential characteristics which distinguished the sitter from his
fellow-men are evidently grasped intuitively, and made the most of.
At the time of his first acquaintance with my father Mr. Linnell was
living at Cirencester Place, Fitzroy Square, in the midst of a career
equally remarkable for determined industry, indomitable energy, and for
eccentricity. He was to be found at one time elaborating with exquisite
delicacy of touch the dainty ivory miniatures in which connoisseurs
professed to see qualities worthy of some of the Old Masters ; at another
taking a turn with his great, bony hands at his own flour-mill and kneading-
trough, kept going to supply the appetites of a family which repudiated
baker's bread. He would turn from the labour of love and enthusiasm
on his excellent engravings to receive some fashionable or distinguished
sitter ; and then, perhaps, to give a lesson to a pupil, in whose plethora of
accomplishments, drawing had to be included. Moreover, by the irony of
Fate, he was then practising as an " unremunerative luxury " that branch
of art by which he afterwards gained renown and wealth. He had, in a
1 It used to be a favourite story with my father that this old gentleman was once
invited to a grand dinner given in his honour by some rich member of his flock, who held
him in great awe and esteem. When the guests were assembled at the table, and he was
pressed to partake of the choicest, he cast his eyes around him with these words : — "There
is nothing here that I can eat." Consternation followed, and assiduous inquiries as to
what could be got for him. "Bring me," he said, "an onion, and a pot of porter."

12 THE LIFE OF
pre-eminent degree, the knack of turning everything— his friendships, his
natural gifts, and his opportunities, to the greatest possible advantage ;
while his stern self-denial, and contempt for conventionalities of all kinds,
made it a greater pleasure to save and to hoard up his savings than to
spend them on personal comfort and personal appearance.
Now it was only natural that such a man as this with his extraordinary
versatility, vitality, energy, and executive powers, together with his
eminent friends, and his fine old books, should attract a student much
younger than himself, who was possessed of some characteristics com
plementary to his own ; and, having attracted him, it was also natural that
he should give him an impulse in a right direction. But before ascertain
ing by means of my father's written records what this impulse was like
we should remind ourselves that the phraseology of these records will al
together mislead us if we attempt to compare it with that used by any
average man. My father's reverence for anything that even distantly
approached greatness of character was as exceptional as his own self-
abasement ; and, throughout his life, his tendency was always to take
people at their own valuation of themselves, and sometimes even above it.
He inherited from his father the habit of committing to paper whatever
he considered worth remembering, and he had formed another habit of
carefully writing down the exact nature of any difficulty he encountered,
because, in doing so, he found that the solution often suggested itself. More
than twenty of the large, clasped pocket-books in which these memoranda
were made have been preserved, and they also contain so many sketches,
poems, essays, and columns of accounts, that the series, as far as it goes,
forms a kind of skeleton autobiography.
Among the earliest of these memoranda are the following : —
"¦November, 1822 to June 9, 1824. — Now it is twenty months since you
'began to draw. Your second trial begins. Make a new experiment.
" Draw near to Christ, and see what is to be done with Him to back you.
" Your indolent moments rise up, each as a devil and as a thorn at the
" quick. Keep company with the friends of Publicans and sinners, and
" see if, in such society, you are not ashamed to be idle. Ask Christ to
" manifest to you these things ; Christ looking upon Peter (called Repentance)
" and Peter's countenance. Christ's promise to the dying thief— the looks
" of both. Christ leading His blessed to fountains of living waters (which
" being the union of all vision, should be done as the artist's Prince) ;
"Jesus weeping at Lazarus' tomb. The three first are the chief, and
"are almost unpaintable— quite, without Christ. Lay up, silently and
" patiently, materials for them in your sketch-book, and copy the prints to
" learn such nicety in pen sketching, or rather, making careful studies, as
" may enable you to give the expressions. But smaller subjects of separate

SAMUEL PALMER. ,,
" glories of Heaven might be tried— hymns sung among the hills of Paradise
"at eventide; ... a martyr, having painted his murder, laughing, or
" rather smiling at his torments. A family met in Heaven . . . ."
"January 2nd [1825].— Now is begun a new year. Here I pause to
" look back on the time between this and about the 15th of last July. Then
" I laid by the [Holy] Family in much distress, anxiety, and fear ; which
" had plunged me into despair but for God's mercy, tlirough which and
" which alone it was that despondency not for one moment slackened my
" sinews ; but rather, distress (being blessed) was to me a great arousement ;
" quickly goading me to deep humbleness, eager, restless inquiry, and
" diligent work. I then sought Christ's help, the giver of all good talents
" whether acknowledged or not, and had I gone on to seek Him as I
" ought, I had found His name to me as a civet-box and sweeter than all
" perfume. Notwithstanding, as it was, I think (by Him alone) I improved I
" more since I resolved to depend on Him till now, than in the same time
" ever before ; and have felt much more assistance and consolation. For
" very soon after my deep humblement and distress, I resumed and finished
" my Twilight, and quickly took up my Joseph's Dream, and sketched in
" my new sketch-book. Mr. L. [Linnell] called, and looking at my Joseph,
" sepias, and sketch-books, did give me indeed sweet encouragement. Soon,
" by his desire, I went with him to Mr. B. [Blake], who also, on seeing my
" things, gave me above my hope, over-much praise ; and these praises from
" equally valued judgements did (God overruling) not in the least tend to
" presumption and idleness, and but little to pride ; for knowing my own
" stupidness (but not alas, to its full) I gave back the praise to God who
" kindly sent it, and had granted to me desponding, that at eventide it
" should be light . . . ."
In another of these note-books (including a period from November
1823 to July 1824) this is the first noteworthy entry: — "N.B. in my
" attempts to copy the Antique statues to try and draw most severely, and
" to cry out for more and more form ; and then I shall find in the Antique
" more than I can copy, if I look and look and pry into it earnestly for
" form. I shall not be easy till I have drawn one Antique statue most
"severely. I cannot execute at all. The least bit of natural scenery
" reflected from one of my spectacle-glasses laughs me to scorn, and hisses
" at me. I feel, ten minutes a day, the most ardent love for art, and spend
" the rest of my time in stupid apathy, negligence, ignorance, and restless
" despondency ; without any of those delicious visions which are the only
"joys of my life— such as Christ at Emmaus; the repenting thief on
" the cross ; the promise to Abraham ; and secondary visions of the ages
" of chivalry, which are toned down with deep gold to distinguish them
" from the flashy, distracted present."

14 THE LIFE OF . ^
But in following Mr. Linnell's advice to study the antique, my fathei
had pried too closely; and hence (as we gather from his subsequent
statement) his " sedulous efforts to render the marbles exactly, even to
their granulation," led him " too much aside from the study of organization
and structure." Nevertheless, by this kind of discipline, he acquired the
invaluable habit of looking at things with concentrated attention, and with
certain definite reasons for that attention. He writes : — " Look for Van
Leydenish qualities in real landscape, and look hard, long and continually.
Look for picturesque combinations of buildings, and elegant spires and
turrets for backgrounds." 1
At the end of a year of close study and investigation, that was now
applied to better purpose than before, he briefly sums up his artistic career
as follows : —
" As it seems reasonable to divide the soul's journey into stages and
" starting-points, and to stop and look back at certain intervals, and at
" each fresh stage to go back to the primitive and infantine feeling with
" which we set out ; and to lay in such a store of humility, simple anxiety
" to get on, and diligence in the great, nay stupendous pursuit of grand
" art as may stand us in stead for a year's journey or so, I divide my life
" with respect to art into two parts. First, my very early years, in which
" I distinctly remember that I felt the finest scenery and the country in
" general with a very strong and pure feeling ; so that had I then seen the
'¦' works of the very ancient Italian and German masters I should have ad-
" mired and imitated them, and wondered what the moderns could mean
" by what they call their ' effects.' Then, when I gradually learnt arithmetic
" and grammar, my feeling and taste left me, but I was not then completely
" spoilt for art. But when I had learned to paint a little, by the time I had
" practised for about five years I entirely lost all feeling for art, nor did I
" see the greatest beauties of even the Dutch Masters, Cuyp, Ruysdael &c. ;
"so that I not only learnt nothing in this space of time that related to
" high art, but I was nearly disqualified from ever learning to paint. But it
" pleased God to send Mr. Linnell as a good angel from Heaven to pluck
" me from the pit of modern art ; and after struggling to get out for the
" space of a year and a half, I have just enough cleared my eyes from the
" slime of the pit to see what a miserable state I am now in. ... I have
" now made my first struggle — alas, with how little success. I shall now
" begin a new sketch-book, and I hope, try to work with a child's simple
" feeling and with the industry of humility. ..."

1 In the same volume as this, there is a rough pen and ink sketch, apparently intended
for St. Christopher bearing the sacred Child ; and beneath it is written, " My first
attempt at figure-designing, 1823."

SAMUEL PALMER. 15
Among many visits to the Dulwich gallery at this time of great impressi
bility, one is recorded as having been made in Mr. Linnell's company.
"Memoranda, day after going to Dulwich. Cox is pretty -is sweet,
"but not grand, not profound. Carefully avoid getting into that style
" which is elegant and beautiful but too light and superficial ; not learned
" enough— like Barret. He has a beautiful sentiment and it is derived
" from Nature ; but Nature has properties which lie still deeper, and when
" they are brought out the picture must be most elaborate and full of
" matter even if only one object be represented, yet it will be most simple
" of style, and be what would have pleased men in the early ages, when
" poetry was at its acme, and yet men lived in a simple, pastoral way.
" Girtin's twilight, beautiful, but did he know the grand old men ? Let
" me remember always, and may I not slumber in the possession of it, Mr.
" Linnell's injunction (delightful in the performance), ' Look at Albert
" Diirer.' In what a simple way Landscape impressed the mind of Raffaelle ;
" yet his little bits make me despair.
" How superior is Mr. Linnell's style of colouring to that of any other
" modern landscape painter, and yet not half so captivating to an ignorant
" eye as others.
" Look at Mr. Blake's way of relieving objects, and at his colour.
"The copy of Leonardo da Vinci at Dulwich is merely a head and
" shoulders. How amazingly superior it is in style to any portrait there.
" The tone of the flat blueish sky is wonderful, though it is nothing
" of itself. It is the colour of the soul, not vulgar paint. Ruysdael,
" Hobbema, Paul Potter, and Cuyp — how intense, how pure, how profound,
" how wonderful ! "
After a singularly comprehensive list of " fine things " seen during this
journey to Dulwich, once again comes — "Look at Albert Diirer." The
writer is evidently entering that early stage of discovery when the mind,
naturally short-sighted, takes up for the first time the telescope of
knowledge. A few months later, the following entries were made in the new sketch
book just referred to. After describing Michael Angelo as " The Salt of
Art," and speaking enthusiastically of the old German and Italian Masters
as compared with the " Venetian Heresy," the writer continues : — " I sat
" down with Mr. Blake's Thornton's Virgil woodcuts before me, thinking to
" give to their merits my feeble testimony. I happened first to think of
" their sentiment. They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners
" of Paradise ; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry. I thought
" of their light and shade, and looking upon them I found no word to
" describe it. Intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliancy only coldly
" and partially describe them. There is in all such a mystic and dreamy

16 THE LIFE OF
" glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete
" and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They
" are like all that wonderful artist's works the drawing aside of the fleshly
" curtain, and the glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints and
" sages have enjoyed, of that rest which remaineth to the people of God.
" The figures of Mr. Blake have that intense, soul-evidencing attitude
" and action, and that elastic, nervous spring which belongs to uncaged
" immortal spirits . . . Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark,
" embalming spice . . of the finest art. Be ever saying to yourself
" ' Labour after the excess of excellence ' . . . There are many mediums
-" in the means — none, O ! not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of
" great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can't
" be too brilliant ; but individual tints may be too brilliant. . . . We must
" not begin with medium, but think always on excess, and only use medium
" to make excess more abundantly excessive. ... I wras looking with
" Mr. L : [Linnell] at one of Bonasoni's emblems, a rope-dancer balancing
" himself with this motto, In medio est salus. ' Yes,' said he emphati-
" cally, ' for a rope-dancer ; but the rope-dancer only keeps the middle
" that he may be not a middling, but an excessive fine performer. . . .'"
" Well would it be, if those who hope at last to produce works of
" exquisitest beauty were constantly haunted, . . . urged, and lashed by
" this truth, that the more quietly they take things now, the more pleasures
" they allow themselves, the less distressful the anxiety of weighing but a
" little too light in the balances, the less rigidly sublime the ideal goal, by
" so much will be the vale of life the gloomier — the murkier the sunset
" with the thickening horrors of a stormy night. Sometimes for weeks
" and months together, a kindly severe spirit says to me on waking in the
"morning the name of some great painter, and distresses me with the
" fear of coming short at last ; and I think it is then I do most good."
His creed, he says, must not be judged by his work in 1825, but by his
present sayings : — " Though I hope," he continues, " we shall all be severe
" outlinists, I hope our styles of outline may all be different as the design
" of Michael Angelo from his equal, Blake, and the outline of Albert
" Diirer from that of Andrea Mantegna. VThere is no line in nature,
^ " though excessive sharpness. "Nature is not at all the standard of art, but
" art is the standard of nature. The visions of the soul, being perfect,
" are the only true standard by which nature must be tried. The cor-
" poreal executive is no good thing to the painter, but a bane. In pro-
" portion as we enjoy and improve in imaginative art we shall love the
" material works of God more and more, j Sometimes landscape is seen
" as a vision, and then seems as fine as art ; but this is seldom, and
" bits of nature are generally much improved by being received into the

SAMUEL PALMER.

n

"soul, when she thinks on such supernatural works as Mr. Linnell's picture
"by Lucas Van Leyden. . . . Often, and I think generally, at Dulwich,
" the distant hills seem the most powerful objects in colour, and clear force
"of line: 'we are not troubled with aerial perspective in the valley of
" vision. . . . Genius is the unreserved devotion of the whole soul to the
" divine, poetic arts, and through them to God ; deeming all else, even |
" to our daily bread, only valuable as it helps us to unveil the heavenly)
" face of Beauty. ..."
Following several rather lugubrious unfinished poems in the note-books,
with imagery far superior to the unmusical diction and halting metre, there
comes a copy of a very characteristic business letter: — "Samuel Palmer,
" having completed Mr. Bennett's very kind order, begs to state that the
" pictures and drawings now delivered, being somewhat different in style
" from those he used to paint when Mr. Bennett gave the commission, he
" shall not feel the least reluctance to taking back any of this set that Mr.
" Bennett may disapprove. S. P. will be happy to. listen to any suggestion
" from Mr. Bennett, towards the improvement of this set of pictures and
" drawings."1 After another interval of poetry, the writer adds : — " It was given me
" this morning (16th October, 1825), to see that I had done wrong in
" seeking for Mr. Bennett's pictures, visions more consonant with common
" nature than those I received, at my first regeneration, from the Lord. I
" will no more, by God's grace, seek to moderate for the sake of pleasing
"men . . " Further on he continues : — " The artist who knows propriety
" will not cringe or apologize when the eye of judgement is fixed upon his
" work. And the artist who knows art, ere he bring his work forward to the
" envious world, or hope for the admiration of the few select discemers, will
•• elaborate it to his utmost thought ; if indeed, material tablet can receive
" the perfect tracings of celestial beauty . . ."
It is not easy to find among the works of this period which have
survived instances of the moderation which Mr. Bennett's " order " seems,
for the time being, to have produced, or of work which the world would be
likely to covet. In all is excess ; in many, " excess more abundantly exces-
1 These are entered as follows : —
Windsor . . 
Twilight .... ...
Scene from Kent
Rustic Scene . . .
Harvest Moon . .
6 Drawings . .

H

£

s.

it.

5

5

0

3,

,3

0

7

7

0

7

7

0

7

7

0

1

10

0

31

19

0

, 18 THE LIFE OF
sive," but it is just this very quality that gives them their undoubted hold
upon the minds of "the few select discerners" who can manage to under
stand them.
The execution, as in Blake's Pastorals, is often primitive, the design
archaic and simple ; but the result is so clearly the offspring of a mind
swayed almost solely by poetical and imaginative faculties of uncom
mon development, that the technical blunders, and the anomalies, and
the absurdities, find forgiveness with those who have mastered at all events
the alphabet of this strange unwritten language.
Still turning the leaves of the same volume from which I have quoted,
we arrive at a list of subjects taken from the books of Ruth, Daniel; and
Jonah, which it was evidently the writer's intention to attempt ; and we find
also a prayer that God might prosper him in painting his " visions " of the
story of Ruth and Naomi : — "Young as I am," he continues, "I know — I
" am certain and positive that God answers the prayers of them that believe,
" and hope in His mercy. I sometimes doubt this through the temptation
" of the Devil, and while I doubt I am miserable ; but when my eyes are
" open again, I see what God has done to me, and I now tell you, I know-
" that my Redeemer liveth."
Pages of description would not give so good an idea of the aspect of
my father's mind at this time as the passages I have quoted. I have
quoted them reluctantly ; firstly, because they were never intended to be
seen ; and secondly, because they show a mental condition which, in many
respects, is uninviting. It is a condition full of danger, and neither suffi
ciently masculine nor sufficiently reticent. It is, however, not without hope,
and everything depends on the actions which next follow — on the strength
of character available to bolt the flour from the bran.
As regards external influences, on the one hand there was the out
spoken, practical counsel of John Linnell, enforced by the examples of
such splendid and typical energizers as himself and Mulready ; and on the
other hand was the mystic and parabolic teaching of old, neglected William
Blake, driven home by what seemed an unaccountable force which
enslaved those who were willing to give themselves up. Deeper in the
young student's mind than either of these influences had yet penetrated,
there were a few passionate longings and loves,1 and an ideal of which its
owner, though conscious of its presence, could hardly have given a coher
ent explanation. To foster these there was, so to speak, the exotic
1 He writes thus to Mr. Valpy, June 23, 1880, "I can remember nothing which so
"agreeably disturbed my male lethargy, except perhaps my first reading of Fletcher's
" Faithful Shepherdess. But when there I found, in black and white, all my dearest
"landscape longings embodied, my poor mind kicked out and turned two or three
" somersaults. . . ."

SAMUEL PALMER. , ly
atmosphere of a secluded and peculiar home life. In an ordinary family,
or in an ordinary school or college career, all these strange doings and
opinions would have been modified. They would, to a great extent, have
simply died out, if they had come into existence at all, as we feel a solemn
or pathetic impression die out before an hour or so of bustling, business
activity, or the uncongenial remarks of a hostile critic.
The counsel of Mr. Linnell, we must remember, was in some particulars
rather supplemental than antagonistic to that of Blake ; and it is probable
that the young man who was now courting the society of these two very
dissimilar men had qualifications which enabled him to reconcile many of
their opinions.
I think it is easy to see the influence of Blake and his works in much
that I have quoted. Art is described as the standard of nature; the
" visions of the soul " as perfect, and therefore " the only true standard by
which nature must be tried." " Excess " is " the essential spirit ... of the
finest art." " Delicious visions " are sometimes granted, sometimes with
held, and much prayer is made that the visionary may be prospered in
painting them. Some of these seem to have been so vivid that they led to
more than the crude sketches in the pocket-books, and at last (as I shall
show), to a complete change in the course of my father's career.
There is a peculiarity to be found in most of these early note-books of
his which in some cases would have augured ill for the future success of a
young man. The poems and essays are seldom completed. The begin
nings of all of them are drafted, revised, elaborately re-revised ; and at each
stage there is a neat elaboration which invariably changes, sooner or later,
to untidy scribbling. But I take it that this simply showed the result of a
series of impulsive struggles towards an ideal which was almost out or
reach, rather than the descent of apathy, or the failure of energy. It is the
action of a mind not yet broken to the determined fight with the difficulties
of real life, and may be likened to the plunges of a colt before he has
learned to economize his strength, and to throw his weight steadily against
the collar.1
Returning for a moment to a topic upon which I have touched already,
and referring to the short autobiography of my father which was published
in 1872, we find these words, "... but I was unacquainted with artists,
"and time was misused until my introduction to Mr. Linnell, who took a
" very kind interest in my improvement, and advised me at once to begin a
" course of figure-drawing. . . ." Now whether it was these words them-
1 Real eccentricity of a decided type is to be found in one of these volumes, in the
guise of a treatise on " Household Government." This is a collection of masterful
opinions on the enforcement of male authority ; and the ideal is a domestic martinet, who
rules an utterly impossible household in an utterly impossible way.

20 THE LIFE OF
selves, or their interpretation by the occult science of criticism, which led
to the making up of a fiction touching the relations of the two artists, it is
hard to say, but after my father's death it was asserted that: — "Samuel
Palmer . . . was a veteran water-colour painter of the school of Blake
and Linnell, from each of whom he borrowed much that made him singular
among his fellows." Wherever "the school of Blake " may have flourished,
and apart from the difficulty in imagining a " school of Blake and Linnell,"
it seems to me that this criticism was misleading. It would easily lead to
the conclusion that my father was a copyist, and successful as an artist
only because he was so. I must admit that the few autobiographical words
I have quoted do not convey an adequate idea of the kind and invaluable
help and encouragement my father received at his friend's hands ; and I
have taken pains to give such extracts from his writings as will place that
matter beyond a doubt. But in reading these extracts, it is essential to
bear in mind what I have said about his unusual reverence for anything at
all approaching greatness of character ; and also not only that his gratitude
was far more easily moved than is usual, but that he habitually expressed
it in somewhat profuse terms. He speaks of Mr. Linnell as having been
sent to him by God as " a good angel from heaven," and on one occasion
he writes to the angel thus : — " Those glorious round clouds which you
paint, I do think inimitably, are alone an example how the elements of
nature can be transmuted into the pure gold of art." I must admit that
I possess one little picture of my father's, painted about this time, the sky
of which is very suggestive of Mr. Linnell's manner, and even of his colour ;
and further, that another picture known as The Bright Cloud may suggest
the same painter in the treatment of the sky. Nevertheless, judging by
the hundreds of other examples I have of my father's work, executed before
and since he became acquainted with Mr. Linnell — judging by the most
characteristic of his works of any period, it is possible to maintain that what
made him " singular among his fellows " (that is to say the best of his
etchings and water-colours), was not borrowed from anybody, but was
essentially his own. Further, that his art is particularly remarkable for
belonging to no school ; and that its " pictorial genealogy " cannot easily
be traced through any other artist. That the genealogy of a certain por
tion of his early works can be traced through one or two of the Old Masters
and through Blake is very true. Even in the two pictures I have quoted
as undoubtedly savouring of Linnell, there is much that is thoroughly
original in conception, sentiment, and execution.
The sympathies, and I think I may say the ideals, of the two artists
were as totally distinct as their characters, and although my father was
beholden to his senior for some technical instruction in oil-painting, besides
his counsel and encouragement, it was not long before (disregarding Mr.

SAMUEL PALMER. 21
Linnell's definite advice) he struck into a course of practice as entirely in
dependent as his course of thought. Fxcept that both were diligent
students of nature, and (each after his own manner, and in his own time)
full of vigorous industry, I, who knew them both so intimately, find it diffi
cult to imagine two men mote unlike and even antagonistic. It was this
dissimilarity that made their intercourse, as Mr. Richmond says it was,
mutually beneficial.
If it could be proved that Samuel Palmer became John Linnell's
copyist, and drew from that source his inspiration and technique, the whole
story of his life, his ideals, and his struggle to realize them, together with
half his artistic memoranda, would have to be thrown aside in a heap, as a
shameless and fatuous series of falsehoods.
I think we may liken my father's acquaintance with Mr. Linnell to a
favourable breeze filling the canvas of some craft carried out of her course
by contrary winds, and then becalmed ; but the acquaintance with Blake
may be compared with the first haven, after a voyage full of doubt, and
danger, and delay. Long after Blake (as my father put it) "was taken
away from the evil to come" and his body had been huddled into a
" common grave " at Bunhill Fields, his disciple wrote of him as " The
Maker, the Inventor, one of the few in any age," and described him as
a fitting companion for Dante and Michael Angelo — the language of a
man who knew the value of the comparison he was making. None of the
young artists who also fell, one by one, under Blake's influence would have
challenged the opinion, and the only survivor of them all (a man whose
whole life has been spent in intercourse with persons of the greatest
eminence) emphatically endorses it. Yet the influence was that of a man
who lived in " comparative neglect and noble poverty," who worked with
out ceasing to maintain himself and his wife in severe frugality, and whose
very sanity has been doubted, denied, and defended so often, that his name
has become a kind of artoticSWbbolgth.
This last vexed question has a good deal of interest for one who has
studied my father's life — perhaps the staunchest and most affectionate
of all Blake's followers ; and the interest is increased when we find
that the influence over those followers was to some extent personal ; that
they derived a certain part of their reverence and admiration from an
intimate personal intercourse. It might be suggested that " birds of a
feather flock together," and that a man's disciples, themselves not without
eccentricity and full of the rash enthusiasm of youth are not the jury
before whom to try him. But we find not only that these were all un
doubtedly sane men intellectually above the average, and men who, for
the most part, made their mark in after years, but that, in every case, the
allegiance survived their youth, and lasted in undiminished strength to the

THE LIFE OF
end of their days. Even so practical and wary a veteran as John Linnell,
was held in the same bonds. An insane man of any ordinary type would
not have been likely to become the cynosure of such as these. He would
not be described by fairly competent judges as possessing " great powers
of argument," a kindly and equable disposition, and as having a cease
less pleasure in his work. We hear nothing, even from unbelievers in
Blake's sanity,1 of periods of moroseness, of idleness, of physical violence,
or of melancholy. With one singular exception, I believe all have been
obliged to admit that his life was a cheerful, consistent, industrious, and
self-denying life. With none of the advantages of education, or of the
hard polish imparted by friction with society, he had sufficient natural
ability to accomplish much that has been handed down to us with a respect
we are compelled to share.
The bluntest accusation of insanity with which Blake's admirers ever
had to deal is an assertion made by Doctor Richardson in an essay on
hallucinations, which was quoted in a paper in The Cornhill Magazine of
August 1875, and it culminates in these words "... he became
actually insane, and remained in an asylum for thirty years." 2 This
fiction was met by an emphatic denial from three of Blake's personal friends,
1 These unbelievers will be pleased to hear that my father was once supposed to be of
unsound mind himself, and that by his own house-maid. He was in the habit of soliloquizing
and of repeating fragments of his favourite poets. The girl's former master had also
soliloquized, but had ended his career in a lunatic asylum. Naturally, therefore, after the
first day or two in her new place, she bewailed her fate to her fellow servant, as of one
destined to enter the service of gentlemen who were "queer in their heads." I think this
was the same girl who expressed her astonishment that her master should have two frames
of tailor's patterns hanging up in the drawing-room, the "patterns" being Blake's
Pastorals. " The passage referred to is as follows : — " There can be no doubt that some persons
' ' possess the power of forming mental pictures so perfect as to serve all the purposes of
"objective realities .... The same faculty is exercised by the artist who draws either
"from memory or by a sort of creative talent which enables him to conceive suitable
' ' forms or attitudes, and copy them as though the conceptions were realities. Dr.
' ' Richardson, in an interesting essay on hallucinations, mentions a singular illustration ot
"this faculty in the case of Wm. Blake. This artist once 'produced three hundred
' ' portraits from his own hand in one year. ' When asked on what this peculiar power of
" rapid work depended, he answered, ' " that when a sitter came to him, he looked at him
' ' attentively for half-an-hour, sketching from time to time on the canvas ; then he put
' ' away the canvas and took another sitter. When he wished to resume the first portrait,
" he said, I took the man, and put him in the chair, where I saw him as distinctly as if
"he had been before me in his own proper person. When I looked at the chair, I saw
" the man." ' It may be well to mention that the exercise of this faculty is fraught with
" danger in some cases. Blake, after a while, began to lose the power of distinguishing
between the real and imaginary sitters, so that ' (the sequitur is not quite manifest,
however) ' he became actually insane, and remained in an asylum for thirty years.
" Then his mind was restored to him, and he resumed the use of the pencil ; but the old
" evil threatened to return, and he once more forsook his art, soon afterwards to die.' "

SAMUEL PALMER. ,j
Mr. Richmond, Mr. Linnell, and my father. Mr. Richmond speaks
thus :— " What a strange assertion ! I must say, I think Dr. Richardson
is more deluded about Blake, than dear old Blake ever was about
anything himself." Mr. Linnell treated the matter with characteristic
impatience, as "idle stuff" akin to other "lies " about Blake which had
been circulated. But my father supplemented his exertions to secure the
publication of the truth by writing to The Athena-urn as follows :—
" Without alluding to his writings, which are here not in question, I
" remember William Blake, in the quiet consistency of his daily life, as one
" of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.
" The flights of his genius were scarcely more marvellous than the ceaseless
" industry and skilful management of affairs, which enabled him on a very
" small income to find time for very great works. And of this man the
" public are informed that he passed thirty years in a mad-house ! " These
three vindications made forty-eight years after Blake's death by men grey
in years and not without experience of the world carry some weight, and
form as strong an argument in favour of Blake's sanity (in his friends'
sense of the word), as any we shall meet with.
But on the other side of the question there are many difficulties.
Blake is admitted to have had imagination so vivid, powerful, and "dis
proportionate " as to " overshadow every other faculty." But it would seem
that imagination pure and simple, however vivid it might be, could hardly
call up the shades of " Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton :
' All . . . majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common
height of men,' " and converse with them comfortably by the sea shore.
Nor can imagination pure and simple have much to do with a tiny fairy's
funeral which troops from beneath a leaf of a flower in the garden, after
" a low and pleasant sound."
There is no doubt that Blake believed that he saw and asserted that he
saw " visions." He described them, conversed with them, and even drew
them, transferring his eyes from the paper to his strange sitter and back
again just as he did when he drew his wife's portrait. The credulity of
the nineteenth century not following this precise channel it became
necessary for his admirers to explain the matter, which they have done
more or less ingeniously ; but I think we may assure ourselves that had he
possessed that " balance of the faculties," which constitutes true sanity, and
which his most ardent admirers are obliged to admit that he wanted, the
actual appearance of a " vision " after he had conceived it would have
been met by incredulity justified by some reasoning process.
There is another phase of Blake's visionary faculty which is more
attractive because it is not so abnormal as the one of which I have been
speaking. He had, he said, a " double vision " or power of seeing always

24 THE LIFE OF
\ /
"fn action, which with the rapidity and clearness of the photographer's lens
changed many outward and visible objects to clear and often beautiful
mental pictures.1 In this way a tall thistle changes to an old man grey in
years ; and the stars to all the heavenly host shouting for joy. It is there
fore no wonder that seeming trifles filled him, as he says, " full of smiles
or tears." If we are repelled by his spirits and spectres, we can turn with
relief to this transmutation, and find there a'wider and more natural field
for a powerful imagination such as his. The precise point, however, at
which this imagination outstrips the most powerful kind possible in
a sane man it is not quite easy to see. A sane man conceives or sees
within him an exquisite landscape — conceives it so clearly that he is able
to paint it ; but he does not step forward to enjoy the shade of his groves,
or to listen to his sylvan musicians. His Galatea remains a cold impassive
statue. With Blake, on the other hand, the mental and bodily vision ap
pear to have been permanently confused, and confused so completely, that
he was not aware which were the objects beheld by the corporeal, and
which by the mental eye. The point of divergence from sanity would
appear to be the belief in the reality of the mental picture, and the apparent
power of projecting it in such manner as to enable it to be drawn
as any other external object would be drawn. The sane man can see his
imaginary objects within, and it is immaterial whether he shuts his bodily
eyes or not, but_when Blake sat down to draw one of his ghostly portraits
and glanced to and fro between his imaginary sitter and his paper, he
would appear to have been using first one sense of sight and then the
other without being aware of any difference between the two.2 So it was
that when Blake was making a drawing of " The Ghost of a Flea " the
sitter inconsiderately opened his mouth. The artist being thus " prevented
1 There is a curious passage somewhat illustrating the modus operandi of this faculty,
in the concluding notes in his copy of Lavater's Aphorisms. "As we cannot experience
" pleasure but by means of others who experience either pleasure or pain thro' us, and as
" all of us on earth are united in thought, for it is impossible to think without images- of
" somewhat on earth. Soit is impossible to know God or heavenly things without
" conjunction with those who know God and heavenly things. Therefore all who converse
" in the spirit converse with spirits. For these reasons I say that this Book is written by
"consultation with Good Spirits because it is Good, and that the name Lavater is the
" amulet of those who purify the heart of man." After this, we may say to ourselves :—
" Such tricks hath strong imagination,
" That if it would but apprehend some joy,
" It comprehends some bringer of that joy ; . . "
" He once said to Mr. Richmond, "I can look at a knot in apiece of wood till I am
nghtened at it." That he sometimes adapted himself to his company is proved by an
anecdote I had from the same source. One day Flaxman called on the old painter and
said in the course of conversation, "How do you get on with Fuseli, Blake? I can't
get on with him at all. He swears so." "Why," said the other, "I swear at him again "

SAMUEL PALME A\ 2',
from proceeding with the first sketch" listened to the Ilea's conversation
and made a separate study of the open mouth.
But for such anecdotes as this we might bring ourselves to think that,
as there is an enormous difference between the distinctness of the mental
pictures conceived by the highly imaginative and the highly unimaginative
man, Blake possessed merely some extension of a normal faculty ; and as
we read that, in days of old, men's eyes were sometimes opened for a time
upon the invisible world, so, in a degree, it might have been with
him. Whatever the solution of this question of Blake's sanity may be it was
a question which never once occurred to my father during the whole time
of his acquaintance with that human enigma. He saw in him something
which, in his opinion, separated him entirely from all but the greatest of
the great, and to everything else his eyes were shut. Of the deep and
lasting impression made by Blake there were other instances. Besides
Mr. Linnell, three artists became fascinated much in the same way and
I believe quite independently of each other. These three, Messrs.
George Richmond, Edward Calvert, and Francis Oliver Finch, were well-
informed men with no lack of individuality, but they did not seem to
be disturbed by any suspicion, or to see in the industrious old engraver
even any startling eccentricity. Nevertheless their minds may have been,
and probably were, by natural bent as well as by training in accord with
his on many points ; so that if they had never encountered him they
might have followed ideal art at all events in sympathy. Their minds were
also so exceptionally well furnished as to enable them very often to
read between the lines of Blake's conversation. Yet after all, their devo
tion may have been an instance of that mysterious and almost magnetic
attraction which, since the days of the prophets and their disciples, has
occasionally knit men together in far closer bonds than those of ordinary
intercourse. My father wrote of Blake that, "he saw everything through art, and y
in matters beyond its range, exalted it from a witness into a judge." I
think this may perhaps be the key to what the uncharitable would call the
disciples' infatuation. As enthusiastic and by no means unprejudiced
artists they saw in Blake's art something which, in their opinion, so
excelled as to separate it and him from all else ; and seeing this, they
intuitively shut their eyes to other things as a mother is blind to the
ugliness of her child. Whether (granting equal personal intimacy) they
would have fallen so completely under his influence or believed so com
pletely in his sanity if they had never seen one of his artistic works is
much to be doubted.
In December 1870 my father wrote to Mr. Richmond touching the

26/ THE LIFE OF

X

piritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth, a picture by Blake which was
then being exhibited at Burlington House, " Supposing for a moment
" that we have been under a delusion, and that he differed from others
" not by excellence but by eccentricity, would not the merest glance have
" popped our paper bag, seeing him in juxtaposition with the Old Masters
"which, through your arrangement, flank and surround him ? " With no
cause for partiality and with no pleasant memories of happy hours spent with
the kindly visionary, we must admit that he differed from ordinary men by
excellence and eccentricity — eccentricity so great that it may be said to
have verged upon, if it was not identical with a species of insanity. We
may conclude that this was an extraordinary and exceedingly rare phase of
mental aberration in unique conjunction with an artistic genius capable of
giving birth to works sometimes endued with a grace, a grandeur, and a
spiritual beauty of colour, which sets them apart from the creations of
ordinary men. That they do so stand apart by themselves (for better or
for worse), it is almost impossible to deny ; and we cannot deny that, for
the most part, they seem to have been evolved without any direct re
ference to nature, or to the canons of art, being stamped with a very
peculiar kind of originality. It may also be granted that there is some
thing about them which places them beyond the range of ordinary
criticism ; just as there is in certain touching kinds of music a quality
altogether beyond the learned analysis of the most highly-skilled musician.
Both appeal to a subtle and deeply-rooted faculty quite distinct from any
which depends on education, and to this faculty, such art or such music
never appeal in vain.
If Blake was insane, we may yet congratulate ourselves that there was
such marvellous method in his madness and especially that he was poor.
Freedom from conventionalities, an intellect, like some spring days, all the
brighter for the passing clouds, a ceaseless industry, and a " noble poverty "
— all these combining enabled him to bequeath to us some handiwork
which is strangely beautiful, and some poems both musical and pathetic.
Works such as these show "a happiness which often madness hits
on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of."
The possession of a common centre gave unusual cohesion to the little
group of enthusiasts. The " House of the Interpreter," as they called
Blake's dwelling, became their rendezvous, and he encouraged their friend
ship with the never-failing geniality which seems so different from the
changeable moods of insanity. After they had become intimate one with
another they began to hold regular monthly meetings at their own homes,
for the purpose of comparing their sketches and designs. In these designs,
Blake's sway over them is very evident, although it by no means obliterates
individuality. The opinions and actions that grew out of the allegiance

SAMUEL PALMER. 27
to their master ne'eded some courage, for they involved a separation from
those of most other men, the deliberate renunciation of the " main chance,"
and the certainty of incurring that deeply-dreaded ridicule which is so
potent a factor in human life. " Take here," says Lavater in the Aphorisms,
"the grand secret — if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none -court
" mediocrity, avoid originality,1 and sacrifice to fashion." " And go to hell,"
writes Blake in the margin. To I-avater's description of " heroes with
infantine simplicity " Blake adds " This is heavenly." Even from these two
passages it is possible to judge in what direction Blake would endeavour to
lead his young followers ; and we find accordingly, that they courted
originality and affronted fashion with a /est worthy of their teacher ;
while, at the same time, they showed not a little of the child-like simpli
city of character so dear to him. They inflicted on each other abundant
good advice, and in some cases were even known to follow such advice.
For instance, my father (then about twenty) belonged to some amateur
musical society, and became so fascinated by his violin as to steal precious
daylight hours from his painting. But he was warned at last that he was
ruining his prospects as an artist, and thereupon he not only immediately
withdrew from the society but thenceforth " sang and fiddled only in the
evening." About this time, Mr. Linnell was living with his family in part of a
small farm-house near the " village '' of Hampstead, still keeping on the
house at Cirencester Place for professional purposes. The walls of the
five little rooms were encrusted with works of ancient art, and there was a
pleasant, homely sentiment of country seclusion about the place. Although
Blake professed to hate Hampstead, here he might often be found, stand
ing at the door to enjoy the summer air, or playing with the children, or
listening to the simple Scotch songs sung by the hostess, the ready tears
falling from his eyes the while. Here too, he would often plunge into
some animated argument with John Varley (another frequent guest), in
whose favourite judicial astrology he found a topic that interested him.
A pencil sketch by Mr. Linnell shows them thus occupied. Varley is
pointing upwards, and his fine animal physique contrasts very strongly
with the peculiar physiognomy of his adversary.
Fortunately for my father, Broad Street lay in Blake's way to Hampstead,
and they often walked up to the village together. The aged composer of
The Songs of Innocence was a great favourite with the children, who \
revelled in those poems and in his stories of the lovely spiritual \
1 Endymion, writes Lord Beaconsfield, "was intelligent and well-informed, without
" any alarming originality or too positive convictions. He listened not only with patience
" but with interest to all, and ever avoided controversy. Here are some of the elements
"of a man's popularity."

28 ' THE LIFE OF
things and beings that seemed to him so real and so- near. Therefore
as the two friends neared the farm, a merry troop hurried out to meet
them led by a little fair-haired girl of some six years old. To this day she
remembers cold winter nights when Blake was wrapped up in an old
shawl by Mrs. Linnell, and sent on his homeward way, with the servant,
lantern in hand, lighting him across the heath to the main road.
It is a matter for regret that th'e record of these meetings and walks
and conversations is so imperfect ; for, in the words of one of Blake's
disciples, to walk with him was like " walking with the Prophet Isaiah."
I have introduced to the reader by their names several of Blake's
artistic disciples, and it is strange that these more intimate followers of his
should have been distinguished by dispositions in some respects quite un
like the dispositions of ordinary men. At the same time they all possessed
in a very high degree a rare faculty. My father writes of one of these early
companions, Mr. F. O. Finch (a friend of his boyhood), " He had imagina
tion, that inner sense which receives impressions of beauty as simply and
surely as we smell the sweetness of the rose and the woodbine." It is
natural that persons having so much in common between themselves and
so little in common with the world at large should become unusually'
intimate. Among them none was more remarkable than Mr. Edward
Calvert — so original a genius that he is worthy of a closer acquaintance.
" A philosopher to whom I am indebted for some rudiments of civiliza
tion," wrote my father in 1872, "stood still suddenly one day when we
were walking and talking, and uttered these words — ' Light is orange.' They
have never been forgotten." This philosopher was Mr. Calvert, who was, I
believe, the same "accomplished friend" (then a young man) who, "in
the pleasant vale of Bickley . . . sat down under a tree, and solaced him
self by repeating aloud in the sonorous original passages from one of Virgil's
J Eclogues," to be greeted by an acquaintance with the exclamatipn " O you
poor lost creature ! " To this friend, my father says he was indebted for
some of the happiest hours of his life, and it was to him that he sent the
first words written after its most crushing sorrow. A few months before his
death, he writes again to the same gifted person :— " Your kindnesses to
" me are among my few pleasures of memory. They were of a rare quality ;
" for, as my wife and I love to say, they never varied with my circumstances
" which, though never prosperous, were sometimes much the reverse. You
"hated me for three days for singing, you 'The British Grenadiers' and
" that was all ! " 1
1 Such was this gentleman's refinement of taste, and such his love for ancient Greece
and its heroes, that the infliction of 'The British Grenadiers' must have tried him
seriously. It was sung by my father precisely for this purpose. He really disliked the
sentiment of the song well nigh as much as did his.friend. See Letter LXII.

SAMUEL PALMER. 2<i
Speaking of one of Mr. Calvert's works, my father says, ¦• 1 don't set
up for a judge, but like a blind baby feeling for the breast know the taste
of milk, with a somewhat precocious appetite for cream. I find the cream
in your Cider Press, which, in poetic richness, beats anything I know,
ancient and modern."
Making all due allowance for the writer's way of expressing himself,
just as we must do in the case of his expressions touching Mr. Linnell, it
is easy to see that the person to whom the passages I have quoted were
addressed was no ordinary person, and that the friendship between the
two was no ordinary friendship.
Edward Calvert, thus alluded to as a philosopher, a consummate
artist, and a true friend was born in Cornwall about 1803. The son of
a naval officer, he began life in a ship commanded by Sir Charles Pen
rose (as Mr. Richmond relates) where, in the " dim light of the midship
man's cabin " he pursued, as best he might, those artistic studies of
which he became more and more enamoured. An intimate friend having
been killed by his side in an action, he soon afterwards abandoned a
career for which he was little fitted. He then qualified himself by a
course of private instruction, by the curriculum of the Royal Academy
schools, and by a study of anatomy at one of the hospitals, for a painter's
life. But all this instead of leading to the sharp professional battle
ended in a dreamy, intellectual dallying with art which his private means
permitted him to enjoy. He introduced himself to Blake (with whom
in many respects he was naturally in harmony), and succumbed in his
turn to the spell I have described. This, no doubt, was partly caused
by his possessing in no small degree that " innocence and humility of
heart " which the old man loved to find. Many of his works showed
Blake's influence as clearly as others reflected the influence of the litera
ture and art of ancient Greece, a country to which he afterwards made
pilgrimage. Some were exhibited at the Royal Academy and unhappily
(owing to his most fastidious taste), many more were destroyed by him
self before their completion;1 for, as Mr. Richmond says, "he was
always stretching out his hand to grasp that which he could not attain."
The few of his productions that survive are so striking and show such
a profound poetic feeling that had he denied himself the luxury of his
" learned leisure " and possessed such unfailing energy as distinguished
Blake and some of Blake's other followers his name would inevitably
have become widely known.
Among these surviving works are a few impressions from the wood-
1 On leaving his former home for his final residence in Hackney, he is said to have
destroyed even the few blocks and plates that remained.

THE LIFE OF
ngravings 1 he cut with his own hand at a " dreamy time " when ancient
philosophy and poetry vied with ancient art to beguile the happy days. The
engravings are such that they naturally associate themselves with some of
Blake's finest work, and they have also an affinity with certain work of my
father's to which I shall presently refer as forming a perfectly distinct phase
in his art. To prove these blocks Mr. Calvert set up a press in his own house,
No. 17, Russel Street, Brixton Road, and it was there that his equally enthu
siastic friend spent so many of those happy hours of which he speaks.
There (as it is recorded), Mrs. Calvert was known to rise from her bed in
order to prove a "Pastoral" over which the two young artists had been
brooding far into the small hours.
Among the wood engravings, perhaps the most striking is the Christian
Ploughing the last Furrow of Life, a work described by Mr. Richmond
as being of "great beauty in the print, but as drawn upon the block
before it was cut, of superlative beauty." The merit, however, is
of a kind that appeals only to those few who can understand such
art as Blake's and a very quaint form of allegory; and furthermore,
who are susceptible to the appeal of latent subtleties of sentiment,
quite indescribable by words and undemonstrable by any comparison. As
a true wood-cut, the brilliancy, feeling, and power of the work are great.
The Cider Press I will not venture to describe, because the words I
have quoted about it raise the expectations of its excellence so highly that
unless the beholder possessed my father's special qualifications to judge of
this excellence and the same standards of comparison he might condemn the
verdict as being as absurd as the verdict (which he will find hereafter) on
Giulio Romano's Nursing of Jupiter may appear to be. Language is
as powerless to describe what my father saw to admire so ardently in the
one case as in the other ; but from the consideration of the whole of his
biography and correspondence a clue may be found by those who care to
seek one. The Cider Press, in my opinion, is not superior in sentiment to a
little " pastoral " which has as its subject a youthful couple retiring to rest in
their tiny, ancient cottage. Seen through the lattice and upon the right-
hand side of the design is a glimpse of a twilight landscape with a crescent
moon and brilliant stars, which is doubly condensed poetry.
Of Mr. Calvert's original opinions, equally original delivery, and a few
curious peversities — of his habit of walking to and fro with his fingers on his
mouth before his utterances, I have often heard my father speak, but always
with respect, as for the opinions and foibles of a true philosopher. Naturally
a somewhat silent man, his utterances when they came were regarded by
1 The dates of publication (for nearly all the wood-cuts were " published as the Act
directs " by the artist himself), on the impressions in my possession include ii period
from September 1827 to September 1831.

SAMUEL PALMER. 31
the hearers as Sibyllic. Of his personal appearance Mr. Richmond writes,
"he was short and squarely built, with a forehead rather broad than high,
with an expression rather contemplative than observant." Mr. Linnell
(whose words were usually as incisive as his portraits were faithful) de
scribed him as resembling "one of the old prophets '' ; by which Mr. Rich
mond thinks he meant "a Seer of much that was hidden from others."
To use his own words, spoken of Mr. F. O. Finch, Mr. Calvert " pursued
his way and his work undiscouraged by neglect and undiverted by example,"
till on the 14th of July, 1883, he died as quietly as he had lived, leaving in
the portfolios of his old friends a few relics of his refined taste and peculiar
genius. He left also only one survivor of that happy and enthusiastic
" little band who reverenced Blake as their chief, and very sincerely loved
art for its own sake."

CHAPTER II
1826 TO 1833
The reader will have gathered that although my father's first steps in
his profession were ill-advised, there had been a precocious and rapid intel
lectual growth, and it would be natural to think that as he recovered the lost
ground and became more and more engrossed by art, his literary pursuits
would have been neglected if not altogether abandoned. Moreover, the
fathers of most young men are not backward in contriving that their sons
shall become " useful," that is money-getting, members of society as soon as
possible. But there seemed to be none of this feeling in the methodical old
Baptist. He loved knowledge, we are told, for its own sake and not for what
it would fetch in the market, and how warmly this disinterestedness was
appreciated the following words, written by his son beneath the score of a
musical composition, will serve to show : — " I dedicate this work to my
" Father, because, not choosing to sacrifice me to Mammon with the mum-
" mery all the while of Christian prayers, with an affection rare in this day,
" he led my erring steps where Faith, Temperance, and Study evermore
" resort and wait to take the hand of those who love their charming company.
" And because he supported me, never once murmuring, long after that time
" when our fathers use to thrust their offspring from their bosom at the first
" crude opportunity, that they may clutch their gold alone and gorge a richer
" feast." This breathing-time allowed by the father's kindness was invaluable;
and the " free pasture " in the rich fields of literature had a benefi
cent influence which is to be traced through nearly the whole of the
student's artistic career. According to his own account, after he had
diligently read the satirists and learned from them to "despise vice
and folly," he passed on to the authors of the seventeenth century, where
he "found matter to admire and to imitate — sanctity and ideal beauty.''
Although I think he was naturally better fitted for a scholarly career than
for any other, he was now engaged with equal avidity in two different
quests. It is a matter of opinion whether this was a wise course — whether
art and literature ought to be or need to be so widely separated as they
usually appear, still less so hopelessly estranged as they are often found.
But we shall presently see how greatly he was beholden to literature not
only for his art but his happiness, and consequently how passionate his
hereditary affection for books became.

THE LIFE OF SAMUEL PALMER.

33

From 1819 (the year of his first success as exhibitor) to 1826 his name
continued to appear in the catalogues of the exhibitions at the British
Institution and Somerset House.1 In 1826 he entered upon another new era
in his life ; an era which impressed itself as distinctly upon his future
artistic and mental career as his acquaintance with Blake had done
hitherto. One of his early ambitions had been to attempt a series of designs to
illustrate certain stories of the Bible, and he speaks of " visions of the story
of Ruth and Naomi," apparently regarding them as legitimate mental off
spring he was anxious to nurture. Referring again to the old pocket-books,
we find among other devotional writings a prayer which was indited about
April or May, 1826, " On going to Shoreham, Kent, to design from Ruth."
It is an earnest prayer enough, and proves that the writer's art was in close
relationship to religion of a fervid and emotional character. This decision
to leave London was also caused by some temporary break-down of health ;
and it is evident that the absence was intended to be a long one. The
same volume contains a cash account of the Shoreham expenses, from
which it appears that a young sculptor and disciple of Blake's, Mr. Frederick
Tatham, accompanied the Ruth enthusiast, and that between them they
mortified the flesh not a little. The cost of board and lodging for the two
roughly averaged eight shillings a week ; and my father seems to have
lived almost entirely on milk, eggs, and bread and butter. The extras
include postage, books, gold paper, pencils, ivory tablets, and very rarely,
just a taste of meat. The visits to London were evidently made on foot ;
but whether the attractions of Russel Street, Brixton, and of Fountain
Court made these visits frequent, I do not know. A short, fragmentary
journal contains the following : —
"At Shoreham, Kent, August 30, 1826. God worked in great love with
" my spirit last night, giving me a founded hope that I might finish my
" Naomi before Bethlehem, and (to me) in a short time  That night,
" when I hoped and sighed to complete the above subject well (it will be my
" maiden finished figure drawing), I hoped only in God, and determined
" next morning to attempt working on it in God's strength. . . . Now I go
"out to draw some hops that their fruitful sentiment may be infused into
"my figures  August 31. We do or think nothing good but it has
" its reward. I worked with but little faith on my Naomi before Bethlehem
" this morning and succeeded just in proportion. After dinner I was helped
" against the enemy so that I thought one good thought. I immediately
" drew on my cartoon much quicker and better. . . . Satan tries violently
" to make me leave reading the Bible and praying  O artful enemy,
1 Some thirteen of his works were hung at the Royal Academy, up to and including
1826.

:34 THE LIFE OF
V " to keep me, who devote myself entirely to poetic things, from the best of
" books and the finest, perhaps, of all poetry. . . I will endeavour, God
" helping, to begin the day by dwelling on some short piece of scripture, and
" praying for the Holy Ghost thro' the day to inspire my art. Now, in the
" twilight, let Him come that at evening-time it may be light. God bless
" my father and brother and poor dear old nurse ; who, though a misled
" Baptist, shall sing among the redeemed for ever. . . . The last 4 or 5
" mornings I thank God that He has mercifully taken off the load of horror
" which was wont so cruelly to scare my spirits on awaking.1 Be His great
" name ever blest ; He persists to do me good, spite of myself, and some-
" times puts into my mind the unchangeableness of His promise, the reality
" of future things. Then I know that faith is the substance of things hoped
" for, the evidence of things not seen. . . . Wednesday. Read scripture.
" In morning, ill and incapable, in afternoon really dreadful gloom ; toward
" evening the dawn of some beautiful imaginations, and then some of those
" strong thoughts given that push the mind [to] a great progress at once,
" and strengthen it, and bank it in on the right road to TRUTH. I had
" believed and prayed as much or more than my wretched usual, and was
"near saying 'what matter my faith and prayer?', for all day I could do
" nothing ; but at evening-time it was light ; and at night, such blessed
" help and inspiration ! ! O Lord grant me, I beseech Thee grant, that I
" may remember what THOU only showedst me about my Ruth 
" Thursday. Rose without much horror. This day, I believe, I took out my
" Artist's Home, having through a change in my visions got displeased with
" it ; but I saw that in it which resolved me to finish it. Began this day with
" scripture. Friday. So inspired in the morning that I worked on the
" Naomi before Bethlehem, which had caused me just before such dreadful
" suffering, as confidently and certainly as ever did M. Angelo I believe."
The remarkable rhapsody from which I have quoted is laboriously and
crabbedly written, and shows no signs of being otherwise than honest. It
is needless to point out how strongly it savours of Blake ; and assuming -
that it is the honest expression of mental action, it must create no little
wonder that even Blake could have infected any healthy mind to such a
great degree with his own nebulous way of regarding simple things. I
must not be understood as making any reflection upon the unmistakable
tone of piety that runs through the whole, but merely as deprecating a
certain morbid and effeminate tendency of thought, and the strange
hallucination that difficulties arising from want of knowledge or want of
physical energy arose from want of direct inspiration from on high.
The works to which this very unstudent-like student was labouring to
1 This is probably the same visitation as that of the "kindly severe spirit " mentioned
previously.

SAMUEL PALMER. 35
give birth and for whose sake he turned his back on London are
remarkable for exaggerated attitude, unwieldy muscular form, and a
nightmare composition for which even the teaching of Blake could not
be held responsible. The spectator is repelled before he has time to '
discover little nooks of landscape which, in repletion of detail and their
pleasing sentiment suggest some of Albert Oiirer's backgrounds. Still
further light will be thrown on the state of mind from which such remark
able conceptions grew by some notes written by my father in his copy of
Payne Knight's Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste.
[Text]. — " Though not to be compared even with a third rate artist of
" Ancient Greece in knowledge of the structure and pathology of the
" human body, he [Michael Angelo] appears to have known more than
" any of his contemporaries : and when he made his knowledge subservient
" to his art, and not his art to his knowledge, he produced some com-
" positions of real excellence." [Note]. — "He produced some composi-
" tions of real excellence ! ! Michelangiolo produced some compositions
" of real excellence ! ! ! ! ! O ! Knight, had you spent your time in making
" works yourself instead of writing about other people's, you might have
" known better."
[Text continued]. — " Such are almost all those, which he designed for
" others to execute ; such as the Raising of Lazarus, the Descent from
" the Cross, and the Entombing of Christ ; in which he lowered the tone
" of his invention to meet the capacities of the colourists, Sebastian del
" Piombo, and Daniel di Volterra; and thus, through mere condescension,
" became natural, easy, and truly sublime." [Note]. — " What original
" Inventor but can assert the impossibility of this, with respect to
" Michelangiolo and anyone else ! He became truly sublime by lowering
" the tone of his invention ! ! ! Was this a descent to Parnassus or an
" ascent to the Bathos ? "
[Text]. "... there has always appeared to me more of real grandeur
" and sublimity in Raphael's small picture of the Descent of God, or
" Vision of Ezekiel ; 1 and in Salvator Rosa's of Saul and the Witch of
" Endor, than in all the vast and turgid compositions of the Sistine chapel.
" Salvator, indeed, scarcely ever attempts grandeur of form, in the out-
" lines of his figures ; but he as seldom misses, what is of much more im-
" portance in his art, grandeur of effect in the general composition of his
" pictures. In the wildest flights of his wild imagination, he always exhibits
" just and natural action and expression ; of which the picture above
"cited is a remarkable instance." [Note].— "Those artists vvho are
" so base that they do not attempt grandeur of form and yet lyingly
1 This picture is alluded to by my father in one of his letters, as an instance of the
"condensing power of art."
D 2

36 THE LIFE OF
" pretend to grand effect are now called modest ; but those who, as
" William Blake, do attempt and achieve both will, with him, by blind
" cunning and stupid wilfulness be set down impudent madmen : for our
" taste is Dutch ; Rembrandt is our Da Vinci, and Rubens our Michel-
" angiolo ! This is not an over-sounding of the depth of our degradation."
[Text continued].— "The visionary spectres in the background are wild
" and fantastic in their forms, as such fictitious beings might naturally be
" supposed to appear ; but the mixture of horror and frenzy in the witch, of
" awe and anxiety in the monarch, and of terror and astonishment in the
" soldiers, are expressed, both in their countenances and gestures, with all
" the truth and nice discrimination of nature ; and with all the dignity and
" elevation of poetry. The general effect of the whole, too, is extremely
" grand and imposing ; and it is this general effect that pre-engages the
" attention, and thus disposes the mind to sympathize with the parts." [The
"italics are my father's.] [Note]. — "As if he had said, 'You see,
" artist, what a light and trivial superfluity is grandeur of form in the out-
" lines of your figures, for here ' are produced without it not only more real
" grandeur and sublimity than are in all the Sistine Chapel, but here are
" individual figures wild and fantastic in their forms — here is a witch in
" whom are mixt horror and frenzy ; here are awe and anxiety in a monarch ;
" here are terror and astonishment in the soldiers — here are all these
" express'd both in their countenances and GESTURES — mark ! their
" GESTURES — and that too with all the truth and nice discrimination
" of nature and with all the dignity and elevation of poetry, by one
" who scarcely ever attempts grandeur of form in the outliues of his
" figures ! ' Passions express'd not only in countenances but in gestures
" with all the dignity and elevation of poetry, by one who scarcely ever
" attempts grandeur of form in the outlines of his figures ! ! ! ! "
[Text continued]. — " Those painters who, in their zeal for the grand
" style, affect to despise what they are pleased to call tricks of light and
" shade do in reality despise the most powerful means, which their art affords,
" of producing the effect, which they profess to aim at ; as will abundantly
" appear by the works of Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt ; who without
" any pretensions to grandeur of form, or dignity or elevation of character
" or expression, have produce grandeur, and more imposing pictures [Note
" ' or impositions '] than any of those, who have sought for grandeur in
" vast outlines and unusual postures " [Note " Was this intended for
"Fuseli?"] [Note]. — "Those painters who had a zeal for the grand
" style and practised it however they might despise tricks certainly never
" despised chiaroscuro. Michelangiolo's and Da Vinci's works are models
" of light and shade so profound, subtle, intense, and commanding that
" after their contemplation, the Venetian and Flemish pictures present only

V . / M UE I. PA I. M E R. 37
" in their effects the miserable varieties of imitation, spiritless and castrated,
" blind wanderings and glaring impudence. To prove this, any perceiving
" mind need only carry before the works of Rembrandt the recollection of
" the copy of Da Vinci's Last Supper, which copy is at the Royal Academy,
" or look over Rembrandt's original etchings by the side of the Illustrations
" of Job by our most lamented William Blake."
It is easy to see from these notes what importance the writer attached
to grandeur of form, and it seems from his contemptuous allusion to our
" Dutch " taste that there had been a considerable change of opinion from
the time when he spoke of his so entirely losing all feeling for art that
he did not see "the greatest beauties of even the Dutch Masters."
At the end of the Payne Knight memoranda the following was written
some forty years later : — " I knew the positive and eccentric young man
" who wrote the notes in these pages. He believed in art (however
" foolishly) ; he believed in men (as he read of them in books). He spent
" years in hard study and reading and wished to do good with his know-
" ledge. He thought also it might with unwavering industry help towards
" an honest maintenance. He has now lived to find out his mistake. He
' is living somewhere in the environs of London, old, and neglected, isolated
" — laughing at the delusion under which he trimmed the midnight lamp
" and cherished the romance of the good and beautiful ; except so far as
" that, for their own sake, he values them above choice gold. He has
" learned however not to 'throw pearls to hogs'; and appears, I believe,
" in company, only a poor good-natured fellow fond of a harmless jest."
Now if we turn after reading these notes of my father's to the most
singular of the works upon which he was engaged just after the time he
left London, we shall find it pretty evident that he himself " sought for
grandeur in vast outlines and unusual postures " ; and that he spurred
his hobby onwards by means of his unmeasured admiration of Michael
Angelo, Fuseli and Blake, till in some instances, in seeking the sublime \
he sank to the ridiculous.
In the first of the examples before me (all of them being in mono
chrome), two inordinately brawny female figures, one young, the other
older, are crammed into the opposite sides of a design measuring about
17 inches by ii-l. Between them is a low table bearing some small fruits,
and on the sward just beyond the barn or cottage where they sit, dance
four men and women in a measure which would do honour to the orgies of
any savages correspondingly muscular. A few sheep (in the conventional
rows affected by Blake) browse behind, and behind them again is a cottage
bosomed in rugged -but abnormally fertile country. On one side, an open
manuscript shows certain biblical writings. Parts of the figures, such as the
extremities, are elaborated with evident pains and show some knowledge.

38 THE LIFE OF
A still more remarkable design is one probably identical with the Naomi
before Bethlehem which caused so many mental throes. The wildest concep
tions of Blake and Fuseli combined with the most extravagant symbolism
of early art could not be more wild and extravagant than this. It is of the
same size as the drawing last described, but much more elaborate, and there
are crowded into it seven or eight figures. Upon the right, staring fearfully
and fixedly at the spectator, stands a woman. She points towards a kind of
symbolic city which is half concealed by the flaming rays of a portentous sun,
and her extended arms separate a heavy, shroud-like cloak. Leaning
on her bosom in a somewhat graceful attitude is a girl in classical drapery.
On the left and also in the foreground are two old men with limbs so
huge, attitudes so contorted, and countenances so forbidding, that it is
difficult to associate them in any way with the story of Ruth. They are
reapers, and one holds in his hand an archaic sickle, his foot resting on
bundles of corn. Behind them walks another reaper, and behind him
again appear the grotesque heads of two oxen. In the middle of the
background a] sleeper pillows his head upon the abundant grain, while
over him seems to hover a female spirit possessed by some great emotion.
Close to the sun and just rising above the horizon, a crescent moon and six
stars of astounding size blaze in the sky.
Such are the works for which the young painter bestowed his prayers
and his energy during the first summer's residence in Kent, but it is art
which is hardly of the kind suggested by some of the extracts I have quoted.
Although intense of its kind, it does not look as if it grew so much from
prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving as from inexperience lashed on by an ill-
controlled and powerful imagination which, in its own turn, was nurtured
by some strong and strange influence. If nature has been consulted, it has
been consulted as it were in a distorting glass ; and the canons of an artistic
fanaticism have prevailed against all else.
Now although the benefits of this strange practice were probably very
small in proportion to the time expended, the results were not indefinite or
doubtful. Had the same time been spent at an academy, or under the direct
daily influence of any artist, the ideal which all this while steadily
kept its place in the student's mind might have been extinguished, the
search for the fuel which fed that ideal abandoned, and that unconscious
plagiarism which gradually tempts the beginner to follow some school, or
style, or individual might have become possible. By retiring to a lovely
and secluded spot and there wrestling with difficulties which must have
been appalling for the sake of this preconceived ideal the young artist risked
professional extinction, but happened upon a tangled and disused path in
art — one which he knew had been trodden by illustrious feet.
It was natural that the eremitical and uncouth form of artistic enthu-

SAMUEL PALMER. jv
siasm which I have described should be put down by any prosperous
London painter who concerned himself about it at all as professional
suicide. Accordingly, in the midst of the Shoreham accounts, there is a
rough draft of a letter to Mr. Linnell, part of which runs thus :— " I am
"startled by this sentence in a letter just received from my father, ' Mr.
" Linnell . . . foretells that your voluntary secession from artists will end
" in the withering of art in your mind. He has known it to be so . . . ' "
Nevertheless, in spite of this warning, either the book of Ruth or the beauti
ful scenery of Kent held its own against the artists of London, and instead
of rejoining them my father made up his mind to leave town altogether.
A very small income, recently inherited, made him feel comparatively in
dependent, but he had no intention of separating himself from his father.
While the student had been passing his time as we have seen, the bookseller
had determined to relinquish an unremunerative business, being willing no
doubt to leave a dingy house and the rattle of incessant traffic for a peaceful
and beautiful valley. So, taking with him his private library, and Mary Ward
as housekeeper, he joined his son at Shoreham, there "walled about with
books " to begin a long sojourn. It was to this period of his own life that
my father in his old age dearly loved to look back, and from the remin
iscences of those seven glorious years, illustrated by the contents of a
portfolio devoted to the art of the same period, his hearers were able to
form in their minds a vivid and characteristic picture.
The neighbourhood of Shoreham is lovely still ; for by some fortunate
caprice of Capital, it has not only remained unfashionable, but has survived
with less devastation than usual the advent of the inevitable railway and
the attendant villa. The village is still adorned by much that is ancient,
and nestles in a hollow between two shapely shoulders of the chalk range
near Sevenoaks. It is threaded by the cheery, trout-haunted little Darent,
winding its way past old Lullingstone to Farningham and Dartford, through
old 'demesnes and water-meadows ; while, here and there (to make it
pay its way as even the gayest rivers should), there rumbles a venerable
mill. London i-s only twenty miles away ; but years ago, a distance now
disposed of by a few puffs of steam kept back that foul tide that has crept
little by little over so much of Kent and Surrey. No unsavoury crowds defiled
the sweet air with their ribaldry, and no shrieking engine startled the hares
from their twilight supper, or the herons from their patient watch over the
shallows. Everything connected with the little village in those happy
times seemed wrapped about with a sentiment of cosy, quiet antiquity,
full of associations that carried you far back into the pastoral life of
merry England, years ago.
Lingering on in the ancestral parks stood many a "shattered veteran "

4o 7 HE LIFE OF
of a thousand winters' gales, glad enough at last to rest his aged limbs upon
the ground they had shaded for centuries. Dingles and combes clothed
with tall brakes or the wayfaring tree and whitethorn teemed with living
things. Indeed, some of the ancient peasants stoutly maintained that
snakes " of the bigness of a man's leg," and deadly lizards basked sleepily on
out-of-the-way banks where men never passed. Moreover, a stout old yeoman,
jogging home from market through the valley at twilight, once saw a
flying reptile which, by dint of whip and spur, he overtook and slew ;
and there, they said, it was to be seen by unbelievers the next day, lying on
a wall at Otford, wings and all !
Spring clothed the innumerable orchards with clotted blossom, and
Autumn never failed to fulfil this fair promise by lavishing the fruits in
such profusion that the very leaves seemed in hiding, and the boughs were
bent lower and lower till their treasure rested on the grass. Rich too
were the harvests that the kindly soil gave to her sunburnt children, whose
dress was beautiful and whose every implement was archaic. No grudging
machinery clawed away the gleaner's perquisite, but they toiled on till the
harvest-moon gilded their faces and the hungry owl gave them shrill
warning of his supper-time.
As for the jovial time of hop-picking, the whole village made " sunshine
holiday " then ; and age and youth and childhood, merrily singing as they
worked, garnered in the fragrant crop without the help of strangers.
When winter came and great drifts lay upon the hills for weeks
together, those happy countrymen plied their flails amain in huge, thatched
barns where, centuries before, the good-natured goblin may have drudged
with all his "awful strength" to earn his cream-bowl. Then, tired out,
they betook themselves to the snug chimney-corner and listened, as the
storm swept down the valley, to the old people's tales. For village super
stitions lingered then in plenty, and as to the haunted chamber at the
Grange, its dread secret was a topic for generation after generation of the
rustic wiseacres.
Who shall picture in his mind the hues ot those summer sunsets— the
deep amber twilights throwing out into sharp and solemn relief the
densely-wooded hills, with here and there a sailing heron, or a few belated
rooks? Who shall describe those impassioned notes sung "so wild and
well " in the May starlight, while each brake and coppice rang with an
answer from a feathered throat ? The tempests too, that burst upon the
valley after days of sultriness, were far more terrific than ever afterwards,
and once the lightning fell, it is said, like a very rain of fire.
The Moon herself bore little resemblance to the pallid, small reality
we see above us nowadays. She seemed to blush and bend herself
owards men (as when she stooped to kiss Endymion in olden time)

SAMUEL PALMER. 4I
casting a warm, romantic glow over the landscape that slept at her
feet. The village church, sixty years ago, was an example of the ineffable
beauty time sometimes bestows on human handiwork as if to make
amends for the short span of human life ; but from this condition it has
long since been effectually rescued. Rich and poor, gentleman, yeoman
and labourer joined their lusty voices, led slowly by stringed and wind
instruments. The cheery bells pealed year after year across the fields for
gay weddings and national thanksgivings, but now the deepest of them all
has tolled for each of those village worthies, who have rested side by side
so long that the yellow lichen and tendrils of ivy have crept over their
once familiar names and blotted out their virtues.
Such then was the " valley of vision " as my father saw it, and such the
village where he took up his abode. He left London with a devoutly
serious purpose, and with the certainty of failing in that purpose partly
because his ideal was inaccessible, and partly through ascribing his
failures to the wrong causes. A diminutive " independence " was made to
stretch to the meagre limit of the most frugal habits, and his ignorance of
the ways of the world well-nigh amounted to the childish simplicity of
Blake's ideal. None of his ambitions and few of his wants seemed to be
those of ordinary men, and it is therefore a small wonder that the life on
which he was now entering should altogether differ from ordinary lives.
His art, his writings, many of his tastes, and even his dress at this period
were all strikingly peculiar ; and the friends who afterwards frequented
Shoreham having "congenial taste," they formed altogether a remarkable
little clique which no doubt set the whole village agape.
When my father was no longer responsible for the Shoreham house
keeping the almost austere privations of his previous stay were in some
slight degree relaxed, and a few recipes for savoury but always economical
dishes found their way into the memorandum-books. The family
allowed themselves one expensive luxury, and only one. Tea, costly
as it then was, added such cosiness to the long evenings — such zest to
Chaucer and Ben Jonson that it was irresistible. My father often began
the winter's day with a plunge into the Darent and a breakfast of bread
and apples ; but when the moon looked over the woods of the eastward
down, and the latten-bells of the last team had jangled by in the frosty air,
the two enthusiasts and their friends put the steaming tea-pot by the fire
and reached down the tall folios from the book-shelves.
" Waterhouse," the scene of these literary revels, still stands. It is
close to the bridge, and has, over the meadows and long straggling
village street, a pretty western prospect bounded by yews and beeches
which cap the opposite hill. Behind, rises the larger down, which

42

THE LIFE OF

rolls far away till it opens again for the River Medway at
Rochester. Most of the frequenters of the "^ House of the Interpreter" (and the
" Interpreter " himself, I believe), found their way to " Waterhouse "
(journeying sometimes by coach, sometimes on foot) and often stayed there
while they filled their sketch-books. Even Mr. Linnell felt the common
enthusiasm when he looked down upon the village and wrote a character
istic letter to my father, dated August, 1826 : — "I have found so much
" benefit from my short visit to your valley, and the very agreeable way in
"which we spent the time, that I shall be under the necessity of seeing you
" again very soon at Shoreham. I dream of being there every night almost,
" and when I wake it is some time before I recollect that I am at Bayswater.1
" . . . . How I shall recompense you for your kindness I know not, but I
" am so set upon the thing that I am induced to run the risk of imposing
" upon it to the utmost, until time affords me some opportunity rjf testifying
"my sense of" your hospitality, for though I have been at many places on
" visits, I never was anywhere so much at liberty . . .P.S. Pray squire me
" no squires. It is not my desire to be ever called ' squire.' "
The friends called themselves "The Ancients," and their watch-words
were " Poetry and Sentiment." Their personal appearance was as strange
as their habits. My father, for instance, has been described as " remark
able for a certain baldness over the forehead which, added to a flowing
beard (a thing to be looked at in those days), together with a cloak down
almost to the heels, gave him to passers-by the appearance of an apparition,
by no means an unpleasant one, but certainly not youthful."2 All this
singularity, of course had sorely puzzled the villagers, who called the new
comers " Extollagers " and looked upon their camp-stools (hitherto un
known in those parts), as the appliances of some dark science. This is
not surprising, for my father writes that " summer nights were spent under
the open sky to watch the Northern glimmer.and the flushes of early dawn,"
— that Locke's Macbeth music was "^ung by night in hollow clefts and
deserted chalk-pits," and that sometimes the climax of a tragedy was
roughly improvised in a certain JSlack Lane, a dark, lonely place, and the '
scene of a half-forgotten murder.
The party often walked -by night to distant villages, or carefully chosen
spots far away among the hills, whence they could see the sunrise over the
flower of Kentish scenery. They were also especially fond of those effects
that gather in the sky with great summer tempests, and at the first mutter
of approaching thunder, whether by day or night, they hurried out and
revelled in the thickest of the storm.
1 He had left Hampstead and had built a house at Bayswater.
Memorials of F. 0. Finch, p. 47.

e

SAMUEL PALMER. 4i
A crew so nocturnal would have tried the patience of anyone less
amiable than my grandfather ; but Mr. Richmond still remembers that h
would get up even at one o'clock in the morning to make tea for the younj.
men ; and would give up his own bed if any of them arrived on an un
expected visit, dead beat with walking.1
In the course of time "The Ancients" made main acquaintances
among the villagers, none the less welcome for horny hands ami plain
manners. The very idiot (an original idiot withal), who basked away his
life upon the bridge in sunny weather, looked for their coming, for one
and all stopped for a few words of greeting.
In the churchyard of neighbouring Otford, hard by the ruins of the old
castle, we may now read these words upon a goodly headstone. " Here
reposes in Jesus Christ, the body of Richard Lipscombe late of this Parish."
Now " Dick " was the ostler of Otford Inn, but by reason of his quaint wit
and his aptitude for making impromptu verses he became an especial
favourite with the whole [tarty. They never forgot each other, and many
years afterwards one of the number (Mr. John Giles), not long before his
own death raised this grave-stone in the old man's memory.
Dick recorded my grandfather's ministrations to the neighbourhood in
a poem which opened thus : —
" A gentleman to Otford comes,
Led by the love of Souls,
Which Muster Bradley don't believe,
Xor neither Mu.-ter Bowles."
It seems that these ministrations did not lack energy, for the minstrel
sang :— " Palmer is a man of God,
He tr a sound divine,
For when he doth expound the word,
His face doth always shine.'
Space forbids me to recall all the stories I have so often heard when
the few survivors of " The Ancients " foregathered in my father's study at
Red Hill. Among them there was one touching a meek and grievously
henpecked baker whose jealous wife furtively tracked him as he went his
rounds among the village maids and matrons. He had a tame jackdaw
which had learnt by heart most of her favourite conjugal admonitions,
especially this, "Ah! Thomas V  , Thomas V  , You hadn't a
shirt to your back when / married you, Thomas V  ." Placed thus
between two fires, the man, meek as he was, wrung the bird's neck one
day, in self-defence. He was given to unusually emphatic prayer at chapel,
1 My father's journeys to London were still, for the most part, on foot, but were
sometimes shortened by a lift in the carrier's cart, or in a lumbering fruit-waggon bound
to the Borough market.

44

THE LIFE OF

of which his wife disapproved ; so when he waxed very fervid, she clapped
her handkerchief upon his mouth.
It was either literature or music that wiled away my father's hours of
leisure ; for neither he nor, I think, many of the clique ever acquired the
smallest interest in the time-honoured country sports, for some of which
there must have been opportunities. There was a curious absence of the
innate and almost universal instinct which makes these sports so peculiarly
the solace of an Englishman. He rode and drove a little, but the some
what disastrous results detailed in his descriptions of these experiences
were not flattering either to his skill or to the cattle on which he tried it.
But his substitute for exercise was so unusual a capacity for enjoying a
quiet hour spent over a favourite author or design that it appeared to
usurp the place of ordinary active recreations. He certainly suffered
physically from this peculiarity, and there is little doubt that, even mentally,
he would have been none the worse for a measure of exhilarating out
door exercise. The lugubrious poetry and morbid prose upon which he
sometimes spent his time would have been better unwritten; and the
troubles which caused him to give way in that manner would have ap
peared less formidable if he had found some healthy distraction other than
mere walking, or an occasional jolt upon a superannuated cart-horse.
As it was, he had plenty of leisure to read very attentively such solid
works as Butler's Analogy, Barrow on the Creed, and the Lives of the Saints
and Fathers, books which deepened his natural piety not a little. He
writes : — " I mean to get the print of the Venerable Fisher and his fellow-
" martyr Sir Thomas More, and hang them cheek by jowl in my little chapel,
" that they may frown vice, levity, and infidelity out of my house and out of
" my heart." This office the pair seem to have performed very effectually,
as my father approached even his painting almost in the spirit of a Fra
Angelico, or as some devout young monk would have set him down to
illuminate a breviary. Few undertakings were begun without prayer or
finished without thanksgiving, both of these being sometimes committed to
writing. If the fits of melancholy to which he was subject made invention
tedious or difficult, inspiration was invoked, as it had been invoked by
Blake, humbly, and I think quite sincerely, from above. In Blake's own
words, it seemed as if " . . God who loves all honest men " led " the poor
enthusiast in the paths of holiness." Nevertheless, many of the writings
and doings of this period are so strange that, but for the strong vein of
sincerity which runs through them, they would be a laughing-stock, instead
of deserving respect as the growth (however erratic) of a naturally simple
and sincere character.
I have spoken of troubles that marred a time of otherwise unbroken
tranquillity. Rather more than a year after he left London, my father was

<3

is <3

&

S3

SAMUEL PALMER.

45

told that William Blake had died. It was a loss he must have felt very
keenly, but he was able even thus early in life to embalm the memory of
the dead with the hope of a reunion in an unspeakably fair land where
tears will fall no more. After a time of another great sorrow in 1829, he
wrote thus. " The allurements of this world promise much and reward
" little, but the studies and exercises of wisdom, virtue, and holiness, seeming
" at first crabbed and dull, hold in their hard shell endless and unsating
" variety of true pleasures."
It will perhaps have occurred to the reader that, hitherto, I have been
describing the career, not of an artist likely to " make a mark " in his
profession, but rather, the career of a misled, mystical fanatic, who, in
spite of warnings and in spite of good examples, persisted in his strange
beliefs, impossible ideals, and in a course tending to professional extinction,
or to a life marked by " deepening neglect," such as the life of Blake. A
certain passage, however, in the note book of 1824 that I have more
than once quoted should be remembered. " Look for Van Leydenish
" qualities in real landscape, and look hard, long, and continually. Look
" for picturesque combinations of buildings, and elegant spires, and turrets
" for backgrounds." My father never for one moment forgot how essential
to a painter is the close and devoted study of nature. Little of Linnell's
or Mulready's advice on this point was thrown away on him, and now that
he was surrounded on all sides by beauty, that advice began to bear fruit
an hundredfold. With the occasional interposition of a careful, life-size
portrait, or an elaborate, still-life study, he was continually sketching out of
doors ; and as for the atmospheric phenomena known to artists as " effects,"
they had long been, and continued always to be, the object of constant
and earnest observation. Lullingstone Park, lying between Shoreham
and Eynsford, was a deservedly favourite sketching-ground, for its lovely
glades were shaded by trees so huge and old that some of them may have
lived long before the first pious pilgrims wended their way along the
neighbouring hills to Canterbury. Among my father's Lullingstone studies is
one in pencil of two trees, which (as the reader may see) is worthy of note,
The youth who drew these trees so conscientiously, although he was
somewhat fanatical and given to nebulous theories (besides over-much
melancholy), was, in fact, worshipping nature ; and he was looking " hard,
long, and continually" at what he called "real landscape." He had
said, moreover, " In proportion as we enjoy and improve in imaginative
art we shall love the material works of God more and more." Having
assured ourselves of these facts we will turn to a letter he wrote to
Mr. Richmond about 1829 — that is, in the third year of the Shoreham
era and in the 24th year of his age. There, we shall find the following
singular declaration : —

r

46 THE LIFE OF
" I will not infringe a penny on the money God has given me, beyond
" the interest, but live and study in patience and hope. By God's help I
" will not sell his precious gift of art for money ; no, nor for fame neither,
" which is far better. Mr. Linnell tells me that, by making studies of the
" Shoreham scenery, I could get a thousand a year directly. Though I
" am making studies for Mr. Linnell, I will, God help me, never be a
" naturalist1 by profession." Although there is a tinge of grandiloquence
about these words, they express a resolution which, however much it was
temporarily modified by circumstances in after life, was really the key note
of the whole of the artist's career, from the day when he fixed his gaze on
Turner's Orange Merchantman. To quote his own words, he " lived to find
out his mistake " ; and " old, neglected, isolated," to laugh " at the delusion
under which he trimmed the midnight lamp, and cherished the romance
of the good and the beautiful." But, nevertheless, the resolution did not
cease to exist, and lasted on till the day came when he took up his pencil
for the last time. It will be seen reflected as clearly in his last works as in
any of the innumerable designs which he did in his " valley of vision."
We may ask ourselves what it is that separates these designs so
completely into a class by themselves — which makes them hold so much
together, and yet, collectively, stand so utterly alone. Even the Shoreham
studies from nature, faithful as they are, show much besides the mere
difference of handling and their particular degree of skill which separates
them from the studies of any subsequent period. The problem is a hard
one. Among the reasons we may find (we can never find them all), besides
the resolution I have quoted, I think are these. A primitive and old-
world sentiment, allied to a somewhat analogous execution. A brooding
peacefulness, and a certain sentiment of surpassing fruitfulness. The
absence from the artist's mind of any prudential or sordid check on a
superlatively poetic bent and on a superlatively strong imagination. The
continual recourse to the finest literature, and particularly to poetry
mellowed by time. Lastly, there were those strong " loves of the mind,"
and " dearest landscape longings," which were the cause of his being
" entranced " by certain things he met with fron?- time to time in nature.
Be all this as it may, every example of the Shoreham art is stamped, so to
speak, with a peculiar hall-mark ; and I think that those vvho are qualified
to judge will find that it is a mark which guarantees sterling metal.
Among the oil pictures of this period (painted for the most part on
thick panels) The Harvest-moon, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy
in 1833, is a typical example; as although it is so small (iof x 8f inches)
1 My father does not mean a naturalist in the common sense, but a popular kind of
painter who makes his living — often his fortune — by copying pretty bits of scenery
warranted to sell, and ingeniously sprinkling them with figures and animals to taste.

SAMUEL PALMER. 47
it is full of the Shoreham sentiment, and is not without some of the accom
panying peculiarities. The moon has risen behind some lofty timber, driving
back the mysterious shadows from the cornfield below, till all is bathed in
rich, amber light. Few other scenes would accord so well with the profound
peacefulness of the deep azure sky, jewelled by a brilliant constellation—
with the repose of the mysterious landscape threaded by a winding river.
There is nothing out of place in the laden waggon with its team of oxen, or
in the harvest labourers, for their dress proclaims them labourers of long
ago. A Landscape Twilight is a picture of the same diminutive size as The
Harvest Moon, but one in which the " condensing power of art " impresses
the eye with a feeling of space and fulness. A team of oxen drag a laden
waggon past an old farm or manor-house, and, from one of the lattices, a
stream of ruddy light falls on a hillock in the foreground, where a flock of
sheep rests for the night. The waggoner, leaning on his staff, stands with his
back to us, looking across a deep, wooded valley towards distant hills which
sleep under the last gleam of departing day. The wild, gloomy sky I have
already referred to as savouring of Linnell's influence. Both these pictures,
like all of the same period, are remarkable for their suggestiveness, calling
forth our own more timid imagination, and leading it away to explore the
recesses of a romantic country without allowing us to realize the fact that
our explorations are really bounded by a little paint upon a wooden panel.1
Of the seventeen works that were admitted to the Academy from 1826
to 1833 (the years of the Kentish sojourn), five are described as twilights.
Twilight was a time always intensely loved by the painter, who made it
his constant study ; especially when the moon, with some attendant planet,
softly asserts her supremacy over the amber or crimson sky, and village
lights begin to glimmer. The preference is natural, for it is a time which,
in very beautiful country, conveys a pleasure very much akin to that given
by solemn and stately music of the highest order.
One of the largest and most characteristic of the Shoreham pictures is
upon a thick panel measuring twenty-eight by twenty inches. The doors
of a great barn (on the floor of which we stand) are open before us, and
form a kind of frame to the subject. In the chequered shade of some
trees outside, a group of men and girls are busy over their sheep-shearing.
Beyond and far below them an expanse of undulating country rolls away,
glowing in a flood of sunshine. Within the barn on our right is a group
of admirably painted rural implements, together with a rustic hat which
1 Many of the best of these pictures, after half a century of neglect, were sold to my
father's cousin, Mr. John Giles, the most appreciative purchaser they could possibly have
found— one who remembered their progress. At his death, they realized prices at
Christie's which would have astonished painter and former purchaser alike, if they could
have been foreseen at the time the pictures were being painted.

48 THE LIFE OF
was one of my father's most treasured possessions, occurring over and over
again in the works of this time. A striking feature in the picture is the
bold colouring peculiar to this era in the painter's life.
Of the Shoreham water-colours I have many that are notable, ,from
among which I will mention a couple as examples of the attempt to convey
a sentiment of extraordinary fruitfulness and lavish prodigality on the part
of nature. The first shows an apple-tree standing in an old-fashioned,
walled garden. The tree is in blossom, but the ordinary sense of this word
fails to convey any idea of the clotted masses of white and pink that hide
the branches and leaves, and glow in the stream of glorious sunlight that
pours down upon them. The whole subject, from the white cumulus cloud
above to the flowers of the garden, forms a sparkling, gorgeous mass of
colour, almost tropical in its intensity. The technical handling is as
noteworthy as the conception for, although in water-colour, so thickly are
the various blossoms painted that the drawing may be compared to a
cameo of low relief. An autumnal design forms a fitting companion.
Between the banks of a hollow, shady lane, a shepherd pipes to a few
sheep as lazy as himself. Over these and beyond them is a church spire
bosomed in trees, and in the background there abruptly rises a hill
thickly covered with ripe corn which blazes in the sun like burnished gold,
against a very dark and thunderous sky. Overhanging the lane is an apple-
tree loaded to the extremity of every twig with bright crimson apples so
numerous and so enormous as far to surpass the utmost stretch of pos
sibility. These two drawings are evidently based upon actual scenes ; but the
artist's passionate love for Ceres and Pomona has led him from the land
of plain fact into fairy-land. Throughout his life he revelled in richness
and abundant fruitfulness, and it is easy to see from the two subjects
I have just described, how he was attracted by such a sentiment as that con
veyed by the concluding verses of the sixty-fifth Psalm. Therefore, when
he encountered in nature any instance of prodigal profusion, whether of
foliage, blossom, or fruit, his delight took his imagination by the hand and
led it far away from beaten tracks. The result is either impressive or
ridiculous according to our capacity of understanding and appreciating the
qualities aimed at, and the earnestness of the attempts to embody them.
My father, early in his Kentish sojourn, had " beheld as in the spirit
such nooks — caught such glimpses of perfumed and enchanted midsummer
twilight," that he wished he could paint them on ivory as backgrounds to
figures. Where he attempted to accomplish this, the result is very peculiar.
In the example before me (measuring about 3^ inches long), we have the
head and shoulders of a very dark and heavy-browed young man who gazes
at us out of the picture. The intense colour of the flesh and hair is height-

Ruth Returned from Gleaning.

The Bright Cloud,

SAMUEL PALMER. 4<j
ened with real gold, and behind the red and green drapery that swathes
his shoulders — behind his long black locks is a small space into which
are compressed a solemn, twilight sky ; a landscape with a church, a castle,
and a windmill; and, on a foreground knoll, a few Druidic remains
brilliantly lighted from the same source as tlie face itself. The painting
is so thick that even the transparent tints stand up after the manner ot
bas-relief. If such performances as this were in any degree inspired by
the Shoreham scenery, as there is every reason to believe, they are forcible
evidence that Blake's " double vision " had descended very liberally upon
his disciple. By far the greater number of the Shoreham water-colours were painted
in monochrome, such as bistre, sepia, or ivory black. They include
several separate series of subjects which are alike in size. The pastoral
element largely preponderates, moonlights or twilights being very common.
The earliest of these series is remarkable for a Chaucer-like quaint-
ness, and for a somewhat primitive and pre-Raphaelite handling.
The Blake tradition is evident, and there is the same indescribable affinity
I have pointed out before, between these and all other contemporary works
of the young painter. Next in succession come a considerable number
of careful but exceedingly bold drawings in sepia or ivory black, which
show a greater feeling for nature than those last mentioned without any
sacrifice of poetry, while, at the Same time, there is no lack of variety of
subject and originality of design. One of the boldest of this group has for
its chief feature a huge bank of cumulus clouds which look (as Mr. Hook
says of the cumuli of Cadore) as if you could knock your head against
them. They are lighted by a low evening sun which has already left a
middle-distant, woodland valley in dense shadow. Some sheep repose
upon a foreground knoll, and a girl fingers the pastoral pipe relinquished
to her by a young shepherd. The execution is a compound of pen and
brush-work, and varies from the most emphatic boldness in the nearer
trees to delicate modelling in the clouds above. This was the precursor
of that oil-picture of the same subject, previously mentioned as one of
those which shows a Linnell-like treatment in the sky, and it was perhaps
inspired by the "glorious round clouds" in painting which my father
thought Linnell so excelled. A series of very small designs in sepia also
done about this time is singular for poetry of subject, graceful composition,
and for more delicate handling than the predecessors.
Of the monochromes I have two which were exhibited in the Royal
Academy in 1829. Of one, Ruth returned from Gleaning, I am able to
give a small reproduction. A "sketch" was exhibited with the Ruth,
under the title of The Deluge. Beneath a dark lowering sky, an illimitable
waste of waters -bears the distant ark, and surges round a few isolated,

50 THE LIFE OF
foreground rocks which it will soon cover. Stretched supine upon them
either dead or dying lies at full length a tall and beautiful undraped
woman. One arm rests on her dead child, the other falls, together with
her long hair, into the waves. The treatment of the figure is an immense
advance upon such crude and jaundiced imaginations as the Naomi before
Bethlehem. If we hurriedly turn over the mass of these Shoreham productions we
shall probably be struck first by the predilection shown for moons, church
spires, flocks of sheep, twilights, and cornfields, and then by the fact that
,there is so little sameness or repetition in design. A fondness for certain
effects and certain objects has not impaired the fertility of the inventor's
imagination in representing them. Thus, we are shown more distinctly
than by a hundred written ratifications how genuine was the resolution
expressed in the letter to Mr. Richmond. Had the artist depended for
his material solely on the fields, and woods, and hills around him, and
had he used that material in a sordid way he might have given us faithful
representations of those he selected, but there would have been inevitable
repetition, and he would never have shown us as he has undoubtedly
done the very spirit and quintessence of the loveliest and most poetic
^pastoral scenery — scenery which we may imagine as that of ancient England,
when shepherds piped upon their pipes, and the clouds dropped fatness.
There is no slavish allegiance to what is usually and often falsely called
" Truth to Nature ; " and to this freedom, strange as it may seem, we owe
a fascination which, although it cannot possibly be described in words, has
been felt even by artists who are themselves realistic. There is a. passage
in a letter to Mr. Richmond dated October 16, 1834, alluding to a certain
visit made by that artist to Devonshire, which is very significant. The
writer was probably deeply impressed by his friend's reminiscences — those
(it must be remembered) of a highly imaginative artist, and he evidently
kept them before him while he was at work.
Thoroughness stamped everything that was done at Shoreham, and
there was that love and concentration of spirit which will generally pluck
a man from the deep and dismal ditch' of mediocrity and set him on his
feet. There were no smatterings, and there was no sub-division of energy
into a thousand little channels. What was worth doing at all was con
sidered to be worth doing heartily, and consequently both work and
recreation (such as it was) were enjoyed to the full. Technically, there
is evidence of a vigour of manipulation equivalent to the vigour of a
somewhat wilful but eminently original mind ; and just as an impassioned
orator will carry his audience with him more easily than one far more
correct but calm and mechanical in delivery, so this strong colour and
fearless draughtsmanship take hold of the spectator, and compel his.

SAMUEL PALMER. 51
attention more authoritatively than many an exhibition water-colour with
unexceptionable qualifications for the ornamental cord and rosette of the
Philistine drawing-room.
Even as early as this Shoreham period, the pen was a favourite imple
ment, and it is astonishing with what vigour and certainty my father plied
it. Attacking the core of each design, he drew it boldly in with black, or
bistre, or sepia ; sometimes with little, sometimes with great regard to minute
detail. Upon this firm basis, colour as bold and significant was fearlessly
superimposed. The finish was never equally distributed, but was always
focussed on the kernel ; each subject being evidently chosen in the first
instance with peculiar care from a teeming mass of mental material.
The oil pictures, like many of their companions, were often begun in
tempera1, and were wrought not only to a great extent in the technical
manner, but also, as we have seen, in the devout spirit of some of the
mediaeval pictures. Although purchased with difficulty out of the most
scanty means, none but the very choicest materials were used, even to
pure gold and ultramarine ; for brilliancy and durability were considered
as above all things imperative. The pure, white grounds (touching which
remarks will be found in the letters), and the preparation of the heavy
panels to receive them were matters of especial solicitude. The former
were laid with " Blake's white," a pigment for making which Blake gave my
father the recipe. As for the capacious brass syringes (a cumbrous and
costly invention which succeeded the bladders used for holding paint),
many a laborious day was spent in filling them ; and not far from where
I am writing rests the great marble slab, grinding on which the enthusiast
used "to swette and swinke" till the colours reached an ideal refinement
of texture. As a contrast to the peacefulness of the life I have described there
came an outbreak of political fever, but it was at a time of such great
public agitation that the infection of the village is not extraordinary. In
Kent and elsewhere machinery had been destroyed, barns and stacks
burned, and threatening letters dispersed. It was just after the passing of
the great Reform Bill that my father wrote An address to the Electors of
West Kent which was printed in considerable numbers ; though not, I
should imagine, at the author's expense. That he partook of the vehement
excitement of the time is shown by the fieriness of his arguments ; and
it is strange that, in spite of his wide reading, in spite of the almost
universal misery of the agricultural classes— misery of which he must have
heard even in thrice happy Shoreham, his arguments should have leaned
in the most party-spirited manner possible to the side opposed to reform.
1 Sometimes drawing- paper was glued to the panel, and the picture painted upon
that. E 2

52 THE LIFE OF
Although the uncompromising opinions and language of this squib after
wards became a source of some amusement to its author, it is by no means
without power, and it is evidently the offspring of a cultivated mind warped
by a strong bias.
With the exception of this political episode the seven years' residence
at Shoreham, as described by "The Ancients" themselves, is most
pleasing to contemplate, for it is not saddened by any evidences of the
wide-spread agricultural distress, and it almost savours of the pastoral age.
" Over-pressure " had not then reached the village school-room ; the
ploughman's boy was innocent of a hundred ill-digested smatterings, and
sylvan peace was rarely broken by the clank of machinery. A "lenient
penury " chained my father to the valley, laying the foundation of the
wholesome tastes and quiet manners of his after life, and he had time to
drink deeply of the knowledge Nature bestows on such as are worthy of
her confidence. Perhaps there may be some, even in these more enlight
ened days, who would gladly relapse into a time of like tranquillity, with
leisure to follow a refined and thoughtful calling unjostled by the crowded
ranks of an army of competitors. The quietness of the young artist's life,
quite as much as the great beauty of the surrounding country, had a
most beneficent influence upon his art and, as I have said, his Shoreham
works, whether on paper, ivory, or panel — in monochrome or colour are
impressed more or less distinctly with peacefulness — with a peculiar archaic
and poetic sentiment. A hostile analysis would reveal great peculiarities,
but there is nothing common-place and there is no mere affectation of
pre-Raphaelitism. If any feel within them even the faintest vibrations of
a responding chord, they will be moved quite as much by the work the
young village enthusiast produced at this time as by any efforts of his
after life. To the man who would disdain to wile away a summer
among those hop-gardens and orchards, to saunter at twilight over those
romantic hills, it is art that appeals utterly in vain.
There is an analogy between the writings and the art of this period of my
father's life which those who are familiar with each will detect easily. We
find in both, often united with much quaintness of expression, the evidence
of certain opinions which are rare and unpopular. These opinions steadily
grew, and there were few, if any, of those abrupt changes of method,
purpose, and belief, commonly associated with youth, especially youth
unrestrained by any scholastic discipline. A very young mind which is not
only its own disciplinarian but a martinet in self-discipline is rare, and in
my father's earlier letters much occurs which, considering the writer's age,
is remarkable. The opinions of his riper years on many subjects may
be likened to mature timber whose seedlings sprouted in the Kentish
valley. Time pruned them here and there with the keen knife of

SAMUEL PALMER. 53
experience, but the stems increased and remained firmly rooted through all
life's storms.
As we turn from these simple and happy days of earnest but unhurried
energy, perhaps we shall feel a tinge of the regret with which my father
looked back to the old cottage by the Darent when the time came to bid
it farewell. No longer would the hours be wiled away with " literature, and
art, and ancient music." Disappointment after disappointment was to be
met, and bereavements to be borne which nearly broke his heart. Only by
eschewing much that is considered essential to happiness, by refusing
much that is demanded by society, could be preserved untainted to after
life the benign influence of this time of probation — a period of rest
mercifully given on the eve of life's battle.

CHAPTER III
1833 TO 1848
Probably it was quite of his own free will that my father broke up the
country home, and brought to a close a period which he afterwards
regarded as, on the whole, the happiest of his life. Being now 28 years
old, he may have begun to feel that a manly career involved something
more than mere enthusiasm for art and literature — more than a practice
such as his had been for the last seven years. He still " believed in art
(however foolishly) ; he believed in men (as he read of them in books) ; "
he had " spent years of hard study and reading, and wished to do good
" with his knowledge. He thought also it might, with unwavering in-
" dustry, help towards an honest maintenance." At last even some
prickings of ambition may have prompted him to join the ranks of the
stern mercenaries who are eternally thronging to the front, there to fall or
become honourable. The little "independence," as he called it, upon
which he had so long contrived to live in contentment and even in a kind
of luxury seemed to shrink into its true proportions ; so, at last, he deter
mined to return to London. He settled in a small house he had bought
with the proceeds of a bequest, in Grove Street, Lisson Grove, where he
was within easy reach of Mr. Linnell at Bayswater, and of his old friend
Mr. Edward Calvert, then living at Park Place, Paddington.
Whether my grandfather accompanied his son to Grove Street at this
time, I do not know ; but as we find him soon afterwards following the
profession of a schoolmaster, I think it is doubtful, and I have met with no
allusion to any other companions in the little house, save the faithful Mary
Ward and a favourite cat.
My father, towards the end of his stay at Shoreham, had discovered
that " the expenses of one person living as an epic poet should live " could
be cut down to $s. 2d. a week ; but the old memorandum-books reveal that
he found it no easy matter to achieve this economy. For instance, the
poet's estimated nightly allowance of one candle grievously curtailed the
nocturnal talks and readings to which all " The Ancients " were so much
addicted. My father was also perturbed by faults which he now began to
discern in his practice and style, and he catalogues them as follows.
" Some of my faults. Feebleness of first conception through bodily
" weakness, and consequent timidity of execution. No first-conceived,

THE LIFE OF SAMUEL PALMER. 55
"' and shapely effect. No rich, flat body of local colours as a ground. No
" first-conceived foreground, or figures.
" Whites too raw.

" Greys cold.

Greens crude.
Shadows purple.

" ridges of mountain along OPEN COl'NTRV.
This list is followed by suggestions for his future practice : —
"(1) Base the subject on a neutral-tint effect like Varley's little drawing,
*' so that at the beginning the great shapes of the lights shall be forcibly
" announced. (2 a) Invent at once the great masses of Local Colour,
" and aim at once at a splendid arrangement, (b) Blocks of local colour
" before the small varieties. (3) Carry on the drawing till real illumination
<l be obtained. Investigate on some simple object what are the properties
" of illumination and shade. (4) If possible, complete at whatever struggle
" the foreground and figures at the time. (5) Let everything be colour,
*' and not sullied with blackness. Think of some of Titian's things, as
¦" The Entombment. (6) Cleanness of tint. Try to get something
" beautiful in the first design."
Written in the same place are the records of many and elaborate experi
ments in oil vehicles which evidently consumed a large amount of time.
We find also long tables relating to colours, and (for the first time) some
particulars concerning pupils, from which it appears that, even thus early,
my father had secured a good, though small teaching connection.
It so happens that most of the " faults " he confesses to are not to be
found in the works of the six or seven preceding years. They show
neither " feebleness of first conception," " timidity of execution," nor any
lack of " shapely " effects. We must therefore conclude either that he
accused himself falsely or that prudential motives had led to a temporary
retrogression which he soon endeavoured to check.
Six subjects were exhibited at the Academy in 1834, all evidently
chosen from Kentish scenery ; but in the following year we find a Scene
from Lee, North Devon. This is the first record of a series of visits to a
country which, even before he had explored it, seems to have commended
itself to my father's affections, and afterwards became his ideal of English
scenery. I have not seen any letter of his referring to this particular
journey, but he tells us that it was brought about by some third-rate print
of Combe Martin Bay which he saw in a shop-window. Stirred up by
that, he went westwards till he found in the " heaped up richness " of
the loveliest of counties nearly all he desired in landscape.
To those familiar with his works it will be unnecessary to point out
how, in some of his later designs, he idealized Devonshire just as he
idealized Italy — how it enriched his imagination and influenced his choice

56 THE LIFE OF
of subject. Perhaps the best example of this is a drawing of the Milton
Series (painted towards the close of his life), known as Morning. He says
of it, " If my moor remind the spectator of anything North of South
Devon I have laboured in vain." He even went so far as to place his
"habitable latitudes" "south of the railings of Hyde Park, and their
kernel in Devonshire." It was in this way that he expressed an unaccount
able prejudice against Scotland, a country which he never saw or desired to
see ; regarding it with an antipathy worthy of Dr. Johnson himself.
In the year of this Devonshire journey, my father accompanied Mr.
Calvert in a North Wales sketching-tour, being joined on the way by another
of " The Ancients," Mr. Henry Walter.1 It was the first sight of moun
tainous country, and though it was a country that, in his opinion, contained
" the finest prospect in the principality," it failed to gain such a hold
on his affections as that which was fruitful and abounding in the rich,
pastoral and agricultural sentiment he loved so dearly. The weather
was, for the most part, unfavourable for fine effects ; and save for a
glimpse or two through rifts in stormy cloud hanging about the moun
tains, the travellers were not fully recompensed for their journey till they
were well on their homeward way. As a child he had " a passionate love
for the monuments and traditions of the Church, its cloistered Abbeys,
Cathedrals, and Minsters ; " and now he saw, " rising from a wilderness of
orchards and set like a gem amidst the folding of wooded hills," the remains
of Tintern Abbey. To a mind toned by a secluded life and by the works
of the old fathers and divines, such a place was far more than a subject for
a sketch, or an archaeological curiosity. Its grey walls and crumbling
mullions were eloquent of ancient days when the chanted vespers deepened
the solemnity of the twilight, and the glimmering lamp or taper dimly
showed forth the hues of the tall windows. Touched to the heart he sat
down before the ruins and, as he plied his pencil, recalled the times of
old when the Abbey and its library of illuminated manuscripts were a
fair oasis in a desert of ignorance and violence.
Especially fond of studying the phenomena of water, he had already se
cured (in spite of the unfavourable weather) a series of careful sketches of
the finest falls ; but at Tintern he was abruptly checked by want of money.
The Welsh expenses, simply as he had lived, had surpassed his expecta
tions and had left him at last even without the means of getting home.
Mr. Walter happened to be in the same predicament and hence arose the
1 This artist resembled Mr. Calvert, inasmuch as his talents justified * far greater
measure of professional success than he seems to have achieved. He was an animal-
painter of no common merit, and though my father greatly treasured a number of examples
of his old friend's skill which he possessed, those examples show that, of all "The
Ancients," Mr. Walter was perhaps the least influenced by Blake.

SAMUEL PALMER. 57
appeal to Mr. Richmond which will be found in its place among the
letters. The incident was typical of what was to come. Henceforth,
prosaic and ruthless necessities dispelled as fast as they arose most of my
father's day-dreams and reveries, but at the same time spurred him
onwards towards the attainment of a professional standing.
About this time or rather later he writes to a friend as follows, "... hav-
" ing for the last two or three years used the brush incessantly,
" almost to the exclusion of the pen, I scarce know what to write about
" or how to write. It is sad that surrounded by so many glorious pursuits
" — painting, music, eloquence, and the Heaven-descended sciences — such
" continual and almost exclusive attention is necessary to proficiency in
" any one of them as, in some measure, shuts one up from the rest.
" Painting, however, does not harden the heart or obliterate the remem-
" brance of intellectual intercourse. But we are the servants of time and
" space which cut off, sometimes for life, the most delightful intercourse ;
" and we should be the slaves, but for the mellowing influence of memory,
" which has many a time brought back to me the happy hours in which
" I was favoured with your society. I passed Ryde in a steamboat the
" summer before last, on my way to Wales, and wished to pause in vain.
" As I believe you take a very kind interest in my welfare, I will tell you
" what has been my manner of life since we met, at the risk of egotism. I
" have forsworn other loves and devoted myself exclusively to my Art —
" have made two long tours in Wales which have been the means of making
" me some useful connections and gradually improving the aspect of my
" circumstances, and what I value much more, of laying the foundation,
" I hope, of solid attainments. Meanwhile the cranium becomes stuffed
" with gallipots and varnishes ; the blessed winter-evening talks are
" curtailed ; and with the exception now and then, of a whole play of
" Shakespeare at a gulp and now and then your favourite Christabel,
" matters go on much more prosily and orderly.
" It is very much easier to give vent to the romantic by speech than to
" get it all the way down from the brain to the fingers' ends, and then
" squeeze it out upon canvas. However, I should be sadly grieved to for-
" swear all the nice, long, old-fashioned talks  and know of no one
" with whom I should more enjoy a revival of them than with yourself.
" The little knot of friends remain united as you left them, only, if possible,
" more closely cemented than ever. We talk, now and then, of old times
" and wish you were with us ; which desire, no one feels more sincerely
" than, my dear Sir, Yours faithfully and affectionately, Samuel Palmer."
As my father's knowledge of nature increased, he began to turn over in
his mind the possibility of making a pilgrimage to see the master-pieces
of art in Italy, and at the same time, of feasting his eyes on landscapes

58 THE LIFE OF
so replete with old associations— on antique cities whose every stone told
the history of heroes, philosophers, and poets. He even expected, he
says, to see Claude's "magical combinations." Before the days of
photography (for it wanted two years or more to the introduction of even
Daguerre's process), all that an impecunious student was likely to secure to
whet his appetite for the wonders of foreign art were perhaps a few
conventional line engravings, or an etching or two. As to the expenses
and discomforts of travel, they alone were enough to deter any poor man
from leaving England. Nevertheless for two years after he had evidently
made up his mind to find his way to Italy, my father bided his time,
working on with redoubled energy and contributing, meanwhile, to the
Academy exhibition a few of his newly-made Welsh and Devonshire studies.
Early in 1837 he wrote this in his pocket-book, " My dear nurse, and
most faithful servant and friend, Mary Ward, died at five minutes to five
o'clock, 1 8th January, 1837." She died, as she had lived for so many
years, devoted to her young master and in his house. He tended her to
the end, and as a parting gift received at her hands her old Tonson's
Milton, whence she had often read to him when he was a child. Her
death, no doubt, hastened a great event in his life. His long intimacy with
the Linnell family had led to an engagement to the eldest daughter
Hannah, once the little child who -so merrily headed the troop which
welcomed him to the Hampstead cottage. Although now only nineteen
years old she was full of artistic enthusiasm. From her babyhood she had
been surrounded by artists and, times out of number, had sat on Blake's
knee while he repeated his poems and stories so beautifully that she
remembers them to this day. She had been trained to look upon art, not
only as a passable profession, but as an occupation worthy of the greatest
and the best. Every moment she could snatch from innumerable domestic
distractions she employed with pen or pencil in copying prints from the
Old Masters or in making original designs. She and her sister Elizabeth
had already joined the Church of England, and my father used to take
them to the services at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, or some other
favourite place of worship. It was proposed that, after the marriage, the
couple should spend some time in Italy, painting from nature, and
executing commissions from Mr. Linnell for certain copies from Old
Masters that he was anxious to secure. Accordingly, my father, with
characteristic energy, began to set his house in order. Materials were
renewed and arranged, superfluities were pruned away with almost
military rigour, and a pistol with ammunition was actually purchased
wherewith to protect the bride ; while at the same time, I believe, some
curious modifications were introduced into the bachelor wardrobe with
the view of securing more durability and simplicity, even at the cost of

SAMUEL PALMER. 59
appearance. But there were obstacles in the path, and the most formidable
was found in that time-honoured stone of stumbling, the future mother-in-
law. Accustomed to an habitual dread of all sorts of dangers even in ordinary
London life, Mrs. Linnell seems to have regarded the Italian project as
little better than a madcap journey to a land of fever, volcanic catastrophes,
banditti, priests and (perhaps worse than all), of indigestible food. Her
qualms were at last, but with the greatest difficulty, overruled, and the
knotty question of expense yielded to the expedient of contracting a
temporary debt to Mr. Richmond. Therefore, on September the 30th,
1837, the adventurous pair were married by Mr. Linnell's express desire
at the Registrar's office at Marylebone. It was a civil marriage, and
as such must have given a staunch churchman like my father no little
pain.1 They left England four days later, with Mr. and Mrs. Richmond
as their companions, who were also bound for Italy.
My father's first impression appears to have been one of unalloyed
delight in the architecture and rich interiors of the continental churches,
each with its throng of poor worshippers ; but perhaps the pages of Udolpho
and The Italian had prepared him for the heavenly music and slow mediaeval
reverence which he looked for in vain. If his staunch though somewhat
high-church protestantism had been shaken in the least degree (as I believe
some of his friends predicted that it would be), by the ritual of Rome, the
irreverence with which he saw this ritual marred would have established
him as firmly as ever in his early faith. But in his theological views he
never wavered. Never for one moment, even when Gregory XVI. blessed
the vast, prostrate multitude in St. Peter's, with every soul-stirring accom
paniment, and with music which was at last celestial, was my father's
allegiance to the Church of England undermined. The result of all he saw
and heard in Italy was just the same as the result of the fiercest of
Mr. Linnell's arguments in favour of dissent.
The omission of some bribe to an official led to delays in Paris, and
gave the travellers an opportunity of seeing the pictures in the Louvre, but
my father was glad to turn his back on a city with which he had evidently
small sympathy, to begin the then formidable journey towards the Alps in
the cumbrous diligence. The "brutal, butt-end horsewhipping" and other
cruelties by which the miserable team were tortured did little to increase
the rate of travelling, and he was often able to snatch a sketch or two of the
effects of dawns and sunsets over scenes so new and strange to him. At
1 Among some details connected with his family which he wrote jn the last volume
of his commonplace-book is this sentence. " Register of Samuel Palmer's birth is
at Dr. Williams' Library, Red Cross Street, London. His parents were married at
St. Mary's, Newington, Surrey about the year 1804. S. P. was married at the Court
house, Marylebone ; he, a churchman ! "

60 THE LIFE OF
last when the horses began to creep up the slopes of the Jura mountains
and he saw archaic tumbrels full of grapes drawn by cream-coloured oxen
with "faces like poets," and guided by ideally picturesque peasants, all the
weariness and discomforts of the journey were forgotten in a moment.
Fairyland, had. once again revealed itself, and some of the young enthusiast's
brightest visions of fruitfulness, grandeur, and beauty were realized.1
Just four weeks after leaving England he entered Rome, that "wilder
ness of wonders," as he calls it. A letter he wrote to Mr. Richmond
in September 1828, shows that even then he was keenly sensitive to
the associations in the midst of which he now found himself, and in after
years he wrote, " Rome is a thing by itself which, once seen, leaves, the
memory no more. A City of Art which one had dreamed of before, and
can scarce believe that one has really seen." But the time of dreams and
reveries was gone by, and though, in his short autobiography, my father
speaks lightly of this Italian sojourn as his " wedding trip," never have
those words been so singularly applied. He and his young wife set them
selves tasks whose difficulty and laboriousness might have daunted the
strongest and most accomplished veteran. Every hour seems to have had
a labour of its own ; and almost every form of pleasure-taking was made
impossible by a penurious economy. Enthusiasm for the associations and
admiration of the beauty of what they set themselves to paint carried
them through ; but the girl, so fresh from her mother's nervous guardian
ship, broke down at last from the sheer hard, unhealthy, drudgery of working
early and late at copies from the Old Masters, including the Stanze of
Raphael, and the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
While his wife was. thus engaged, my father chiefly devoted himself to
out-door work — devoted himself so enthusiastically and diligently that,
in time, he was able to complete in about five sittings even the most
elaborate of his studies ; such, for instance, as the Ponte Rotto. The
term "five sittings" is somewhat, elastic, but in this case it probably
meant five determined and. vigorous attacks of as many hours as the
lighting of the landscape admitted.
On the 27th of January, 1839, he wrote thus in his pocket-book : —
" Was brought by the goodness of God into my 34th year. Now I
" must either at once produce fine finished works, or ' live a fool and die a
" brute.' After wandering through labyrinths one comes back to first prin-
" ciples. The outline, after all,' I believe to be the great difficulty ; the
" only first step and great accomplishment of art. When a pure and
" expressive outline is on the paper, the prey is caught. The rest is like
" cooking and garnishing it."
1 A Dream in the Apennine, exhibited in 1 864, recalled the impression formed by these
scenes of mountain beauty.

SAMUEL PALMER. u\
The best of the Italian studies show the fruits of these resolutions.
They show a greater mastery of principles, more forbearance from dogma —
more draughtsmanship and technical skill than the time which divides
them from the later Shoreham work fully accounts for ; but the qualities
which made that work so remarkable and, in its own way, so fascinating
are to be found not at all, or in only a very modified degree. The hand
and the imagination are alike in subjection to a mind that has been
vigorously disciplined, but at the same time so wisely that it avoids, what
is so difficult to avoid, any approach to running from one extreme to or
towards another. This painter who was even yet fresh from a life of
seclusion and so peculiar a practice seems to have determined on a wise
eclecticism. He stables his hobbies : but he does not forget that some
of them have carried him over timber which, on quieter animals, he
would have failed to pass. For these reasons, the studies he was able
to show to the Roman connoisseurs met with as much approval from
them as they have invariably done from critics and artists in England.
On turning over the portfolios which contain them, the careful observer
is struck at once by the fact that the greater part represent a golden and
glittering Italy ; and it is equally obvious that the many allusions met
with in my father's letters and memoranda to that long sojourn refer to a
favoured land of sun and of splendour. We hear and see little or nothing
of that monotony, sadness of colour, and absence of brilliancy, which
some artists have asked us to accept as the attributes of Italy, and which
are undoubtedly to be found there at certain times and places. That a
few of the studies do certainly show these less pleasing peculiarities proves,
I think, that my father encountered them ; but the fewness of them
suggests that he far preferred the other aspect, and made as much as he
could of those effects and those scenes which most strongly appealed to
" the loves of his mind."
Not the least interesting feature in the two years' Italian residence was
a series of letters to the travellers from Mr. Linnell, who wrote to them
once a fortnight. It is impossible to read these letters without forming a
high opinion of the sound sense, and manly, straightforward character of
the writer ; or without amusement at the narrowness of some of the channels
into which his mind is pent, and at his combative nature.
On certain points connected with religion, literature, and art, my father
had his own very definite opinions and held to them with bull-dog tenacity.
Mr. Linnell had also his own opinions and equal tenacity in holding them
against all comers and all argument. It was unfortunate that the new
relatives differed on several of these essential points, particularly on religious
matters, as these last invariably " produce arguments of that torrid heat,
which no subject save theology can engender." These differences, how-

62 THE LIFE OF
ever, serve to give at all events a piquancy to the correspondence ; intro
ducing an occasional clash of arms into epistles otherwise peaceful. Mr.
Linnell is moreover continually divided between a very strong desire to
secure the copies of the Old Masters he had commissioned his daughter to
make, and a desire to allay his wife's constant tremors by prevailing upon
the young artists to return forthwith to Bayswater. My father, on the other
hand, had made up his mind to return when he had done the work he had
set himself and not before ; and he did not feel himself justified in cutting
short so golden an opportunity — one which would never recur — on account
of the anxiety of his mother-in-law.
I will give a few extracts from Mr. Linnell's letters : —
"April 29, 1838. [To my father.] . . .1 am very busy, and pretty
successful in my pettifogging way, pleasing those most who know but
little of Art, but who are kind enough to employ me. I endeavour to
learn contentment, notwithstanding a deep sense of professional insuffi
ciency, because I know how much worse I should be, if I sacrificed the
best interests of my family for professional aggrandizement. If you can
make money enough without going much out of the path which your
genius and taste prompt you to pursue, consider yourself most happy
and blessed. Endeavour, by pursuing this path, to obtain sufficient to
preserve your independence and keep up a fair price for your work, and
if you can accomplish that for a few years, and at the same time lay in
a stock of knowledge of the phenomena of nature and the principles and
practice of Art, you will be a Turner some day without turning 
The Exhibition is all in the Great Room this year, for there is nothing
of first-rate interest in any other. The picture of the Exhibition, if one
may judge by the number round it, is The Queen's Council by Wilkie,
and the picture or pictures of the Exhibition if you judge by what is
said, are Mulready's Seven Ages, and Turner's Ancient and Modern Italy.
I have heard many say of Mulready's, when I was standing near it, that
there was no one in the world could paint it but himself; indeed it
appears to me to be a wonderful result of the humble and unostentatious
imitation of nature, connected with pure and elevated taste, and great
knowledge of Art. The color also, which you know I generally assert to
be much more a piece with the drawing &c. than is usually supposed
in all works of Art, is here as good as any quality in it. . . . Let
nothing tempt you to lose your time or your money to obtain mere
acquaintances, which often are only the means of losing more time and
money. Those are the most valuable friends which are made by your
exertions in the Art ; and do not forget that the battle is to be fought at
your easel. ..."
"June 26, 1838. [To my father.] . . . Well, I do not know what else

S A M UE L P A I ME R. 63
" to say, except about my own affairs ; and one thing I learn by looking at
" yours is that, being a grumbler like you, I have no doubt my affairs
" appear to another in a better light than to myself. In fact there is no
" obtaining any peace, I find, without looking at the whole, and caring little
" about some things, provided principal things are well. A man may have
" as much vexation about the color of his carriage or temper of his
" horses, as a poor man about the point of his pickaxe, or expense of his
" wife's cap."
"September 23, 1838. My dear daughter Hannah, I am very glad to
" find that you are struggling with the real difficulties of the Art ; as I have
" no doubt but, with Mr. Palmer's assistance, you will accomplish enough
" to produce some beautiful works ; and, what is of more consequence,
" increase your capability of receiving those inspiring impressions of beauty
" and sublimity which nature was intended to produce. This, I think, you
" will find to be a more important part of the education of the mind, than
" mere scholastic teachers and pupils can believe. It is that to which science
" is only auxiliary. Science does not necessarily elicit perception, for a
" person may know and be able to repeat whole volumes, but like the monks'
" prayers, the stringing the beads shows how little the mind has gained in
" perception. You cannot, however, produce a beautiful work without
" perception of beauty. Go on therefore, with as little exertion as you can,
" always trying to attain your end by skill rather than hard labour — by a
" perception of the principle upon which nature delights you, and not
" attempting more of the varieties of nature than are essential to your
" object. You know, however, that I do not mean to encourage a negligent
" or bald style, for there is nothing I like better than a good fag at the
" variety of nature ; but I am persuaded you will accomplish much more
" by perceiving the principle upon which a little work may be made
" effective. Unless this is constantly remembered, you exert yourself
" more than is necessary ; like trying by force to disentangle a skein of
" thread ; or, as people say, to ' kill the Devil with a little hand-saw.' No,
" try how by skill you can make a little labour express sufficient, even
" when you labour most economize. Wrestle skilfully, for you wrestle
" with an Angel, and though you may halt all your life in your opinion
" of yourself, recollect it is no small honour to have wrestled with an
" Angel, and prevailed to the obtaining of a blessing. I promised you
" some professional news. Now I will tell you. I have sold my Emmaus
" picture. That, I hope, is news ; for an Artist to sell an historical
" picture. Aye, and sold it too to the Committee of Taste. ' Stand out
" my shoon, up higher get my bonnet.' The purchase voted unani-
" mously by the Committee of The Art Union Society. Master John
" has a plate in hand of it, of which I have etched the outline. I

64 THE LIFE OF
hope to do something better of the same kind, but I am too busy
at present.
" I dined the other day at Mr. Sheepshanks' where I met Messrs.
Mulready, Collins, Robinson .... &rc. When we had finished our
wine, &c, Mr. Collins let out that it was his birthday, which started
Mr. Sheepshanks in quest of a bottle of sack, and wonderful stuff it
was, and in addition to what we had had, went nigh to make us tipsy.
Being, however, in civil, godly company, I thought there was no harm in
being drunk, and so took my share. We got to Deptford by a fly, to
London Bridge by railroad, and to Bayswater by 'bus, all right. Mr.
Sheepshanks is a capital fellow. He is as enthusiastic as a young Artist ;
has a huge collection of the best modern pictures with which he is ready
to jump out of his skin with delight. You leave his society with the
strong impression that the Art is worth ten times the exertions you have
ever bestowed upon it. Mr. Mulready's last picture is the crown of his
collection. I hope next year to accompany you to see it."
" November 2, 1838. [To my father.] ... I feel a doubt from what
you say about your drawings, whether you do not compose too much. I
would venture to advise you to endeavour to do as much as. possible by
simply laying an emphasis on the beautiful, and leaving agreeable blanks
or breadths where the objectionable matter comes. And if you think
a foreground in one place is applicable to a sketch made in another,
I would make the studies separate, but I would not try to marry them
on the spot. If, however, you feel otherwise, don't mind what I have
said. I only mention it as a thing I should be very careful to avoid
doing on the spot, for fear of injuring the veracity of a drawing from
nature. I think the remark is of most consequence when you begin
with a beautiful distance and middle-distance. For, if you start with a
foreground, you may venture to insert a distance from nature without
so much danger of injury ; as, in that case, you will in all probability
make it sufficiently subordinate ; whereas, if you have elaborated a
drawing of everything but a foreground and, as will be most likely,
exhausted all your strength of color &c. in parts, it will be impossible
in that drawing to make the whole true by adding a foreground ; and it
would be better to make a separate drawing of any foreground or figure
you think may be good for it, and afterwards in another drawing, put
them together. Take care therefore ; for though complete subjects may
be more like a collection of pictures to look at and reckon upon, they
will not yield so much in the long run as separate studies. Get as many
figures as possible, and if you set them near some bit of ruin, or with
some landscape behind them, you are sure to make a picture by finishing
your figure first, and then adding as much or as little as you please of

SAMUEL PALMER. 65
" what you see beyond, and you will be sure to have the figure and
" background relatively true, besides having a study applicable to other
" backgrounds. Let me therefore again say, draw figures out of doors,
" with the background you wish, as near as you can. '
"November 23, 1838. [To my father.] ... I am persuaded there is
" no departing from truth anywhere, either in poetry or painting, without
" losing by it ; and here I do not lose sight of imaginative Art ; for where
" for the sake of a more full expression of the grandest qualities of nature,
" some exaggerations are indulged in, or allegorical figures made use of, it
" is evidently to obtain more truth thereby than can be expressed by the
" mechanical transcript of nature, which, in many cases, would be un-
" intelligible ... It appears to me, a beautiful and divine necessity that
" right feeling is necessary to a perception of the true means of expression.
" It will show itself in spite of the meanest powers of execution, though it
" will lead to the greatest ; but no subtlety can hide the effects of wrong
" feeling . . . Remember you are not only at liberty, but I invite you to
" be as plain in your criticisms upon my conduct when there is opportunity.
" Not that I think that my practice will bear scrutiny as well as yours, for
" I feel that all I have said above applies to myself, and I wince from the
" sight of my own weapons when I see their point towards me. Neverthe-
" less, I think it most useful to be reminded of such things by a friend ;
" and if done in a friendly spirit, it cements friendship by evidencing
" sincerity, which I assure you does not provoke me at any time like secrecy.
" It is freemasonry that I detest — secret oaths and vows extracted, kid-
" napping of the intellect, and Burking the perceptions. How many
" active-minded, clever people carry about with them a load of fetters
" which they try, too often successfully, to fasten upon their friends under
" the plea of ornamenting them. Some are golden chains to be sure,
" but most are iron gilt. O for spiritual power to burst those bonds by
" which we are confined in ' uncouth cells, where brooding darkness
" spreads his jealous wings ' instead of exulting in the healthy atmosphere
" of divine light and truth. As, however, evil is to be overcome with good,
" let us cultivate a perception of the beautiful in everything, for when that
" is perceived and loved, we easily part with the deformity which has
" previously satisfied us.
"... I have seen Mr. Varley this morning, who brought me Hannah's
" horoscope, all drawn out very curiously. He seems much interested in
" your welfare, and brought the nativity to show me, as Hannah is in her
" twenty-first year and he considers it an important period. I have asked
" him at what period she was ill during your present journey, but he would
" not tell. Perhaps some one will tell him before he consults his book s,
" and then he will know. However, it is kind of him, and I must tell you
F

66 THE LIFE OF
" what he says of the future ; and there can be no harm in taking care.
" Well, you must take care, he says, all next month (I say every month till
" you return, and then too), particularly of indigestion. If anything is the
" matter, it is Mars' and Saturn's fault, he says. I say if it should proceed
" from a cold room and carbonel, it will be your fault, Mr. P., so mind
" your Ps and Qs, or I shall tickle your toby, and comb your head with
" a knob-stick, as Mrs. Francis used to say to her husband. To be
" serious ; do not, my dear fellow, run any risks now for the sake of
" saving. . . ."
" December 23, 1838. [To my father.] . . .for landscape studies, or
" the application of figures to landscape you should sometimes choose a
" light and shade which is very striking and vivid at a distance, as the
" figure relieves entirely by such qualities in landscape very often, taking
" care that the shapes of the lights are picturesque in every part. If a
" face is in shadow, let it be well lighted by reflection and, generally, let
" the light show the action of the figure as plainly as possible, [sketch]
" I think those are qualities particularly requisite in figure as introduced
" into landscape and always distinguish the figures by the landscape-
" painter from those introduced into landscapes by a figure-painter who
" does not paint landscape. But the treatment should depend chiefly
" upon the expression of your subject in effect, colour, &c, and that should
" rule the figures ; and if you fancy a central light and soft shadows, and
" your landscape accords, let nothing prevent you from attempting it ; only,
" remember, you will not escape so easily as upon the other tack. N.
" Poussin is a fine example of vividly constructed plan, though not always
" vividly painted. Titian finer still, . . . but you find the more difficult
" and more beautiful only in Raffaelle — sometimes in Titian and Leonardo
" and in A. Diirer, and perhaps in many others which you have seen
" since your sojourn in Italy, but of which I am unhappily ignorant — I
" forgot : in Julio Romano, you have both qualities — those of vividness
" and picturesque choice and arrangement of light, seen with a Poetic
" Imagination, straining nature through his mental sieve till everything
" mean or vulgar was excluded. Such a man as Julio seems to have taken
" nature into his mind as ore is taken into a kiln, where it is so digested
" by internal heat that nothing but pure metal escapes into the mould
" intended for it ; but I must stop, for that way a long letter lies ....
" When you are grinding colour, try some of the yolk of egg ... I think
" it is better than glue. You may set a palette by this method at any time
" for water-colour, by mixing a few dry colours with egg — the yolk only,
" and as Cennini says, as much egg as colour. Spread the colour when
" mixed, on the palette thin, and it will wash up again with water easily,
" especially if a little sugar be added. Do not carry a bottle of egg-

SAMUEL PALMER. 67
" mixture x in your pocket, as in Rome the breaking of it might be the
" cause of breaking the peace ; particularly if you went to wash at a public
" fountain." "March 8, 1839. [To my father.] ... I have sold my picture of
" St. John preaching, which I sent to the British Gallery, to Sir Thomas
" Baring for 150 guineas with the frame. It has been very well spoken of
" by the press, among whom you know I have scarcely an acquaintance ;
"so that I may feel it a compliment, as I have always rather shunned
" them and despised their hireling principles, generally speaking. I am
" now and then able to devote a day to a picture or two of a similar
" description, and if I could prevail upon Mr. Richmond to communicate
" some of his discoveries, who is entirely devoted to spiritual Art, I should
" feel encouraged. Any one like Mr. Richmond, leaving the Vanity Fair
" of Art, and entering the wicket gate to go to the New Jerusalem is
" such a reproach to those who stay behind, from whichever cause, that I
" could despise myself for not following him, if I did not feel that my
" family is an excuse which I have no right to evade. Besides, I am too
" old, and shall content myself now if I can be the means, any way, of
" assisting others to attain that excellence which craves a whole life of
" concentrated exertion. You, I feel, are in the right road to distinction,
" and need not care about present and immediate return so much ; for
" though, in this age, more perfection is required to obtain notice, yet,
" when at your age, to have mastered so much will ensure the rest ....
" Tell Mr. Martin he must write me a long letter, and tell me all the
" gossip of Art. He will be able to afford the time, which I cannot ask
" you or Mr. Richmond to do; though nothing would gratify me more than
" a long sincere letter upon Art from him, because under such circum-
" stances, I feel the best of thoughts would be expressed, and the most
" valuable hints to a person in my condition given. I am like a servant
" who has only over-hours for study, whereas you and Mr. Richmond are
" at college — at the great University of Art. He ought therefore to com-
" municate, for auld lang syne ..."
J I have mentioned my father's numerous experiments relating to chromatography.
He had already largely experimented in egg vehicles, and the letter alludes to an amusing
incident in connection with these trials. He had manufactured some precious emulsion by
means of yolk of egg ; and, perhaps to secure more liberal shaking, had deposited the
tightly-stoppered bottle in one of his capacious pockets. The bottle was forgotten, and
the coat was daily worn, till one day when a detachment of " The Ancients" were walking
through London, there came an explosion and a stench so unspeakably foul, that all of the
party but one lost their presence of mind. This one, however, hastily taking out his knife,
ripped out the pocket and its contents and cast them into the gutter. They had not gone
far when, chancing to look back, they saw a Jew dealer in old clothes approaching, who
made a greedy dart at the pocket, but straightway flung it from him with such a dramatic
action of disgust, that the young men never forgot it. F 2

68 THE LIFE OF
" May io, 1839. [To Mr. Martin under cover to my father.] The
" exhibition has opened without a picture from Sir A. Callcott. Nothing
" from Hilton. Mulready, smaller ones only. It is a good exhibition
" though, notwithstanding, as the new hands are strong. A Mr. Redgrave
" has a capital picture of the daughter of the Vicar of Wakefield returning
" to her home, when she is met at the door by her sister ; and the affec-
" tionate look of the sister into her face is so pathetic that it excites the
" feelings as much as a very touching piece of acting. Mr. Severn's
" pictures look extremely well. I like them much. ... I had an applica-
" tion the other day from Mr. E. Landseer to lend him my shop to finish
" his large picture of the Queen in. Mr. Collins told him he thought I
" would lend it him, as he believed I made no use of it myself. I think
" Mr. Landseer will build one similar himself eventually, he likes mine so
" much ; and very likely in this neighbourhood."
"June 11, 1839. [To my father.] . . . Your plan respecting 'little,
" oil pictures and drawings painted in a day, at once from nature,' requires
" some explanation and reconsideration. I do not like it. It savours
" too much of the practice of some who have stocked the market with
" cheap pennyworths of Art, to their own pecuniary disadvantage and
" degradation as Artists. Don't think at present of doing anything of the
" pot-boiling description. Better to teach for money, and take pains with
" some finished works for reputation. You are in a good position for such
" a line of practice, and will, I think, succeed in it. Take care of all you
" have done, and do not undervalue your works now, because others
" have not appreciated them. One successful picture in the Exhibition,
" will raise the value of all you have by you 100 per cent. ; and that
" success repeated, will again raise them 500 per cent. Wait until you
" return, and we will talk over these matters, when I think we shall agree.
" Our sense of interest in such things sharpens our perception of truth ;
" not but it is equally to our interest to cultivate just and liberal opinions
" upon all subjects, however remote apparently from our present concern.
" Some very important event sometimes turns upon a step which, if taken
" upon a previously adopted false principle, is most ruinous ; but is often
" taken upon that principle, even contrary to the man's perception at the
" moment of action ; for if the principle has been maintained with party
" feeling and bigotry, the perception of its pernicious quality comes too
" late, and for consistency's sake it is acted upon, in spite of the mortifying
" truth apparent at the moment. We each admire many things which
" are beautiful ; and perhaps if we were to begin from some point wherein
" we are quite agreed, we might extend the base of our mental union
" by proceeding carefully to examine how many things we could
" agree in. We each profess to be conservative of everything good

SAMUEL PALMER. 69
" and beautiful, and we only differ respecting the mode of effecting
" our object. . . ."
"July 30, 1839. [To my mother.] . . . The completing a tour like
11 yours is something like completing a picture. It may be spoiled by
"dwelling too long upon it, and should be ended suddenly; for going
¦ on proceeds often from the habit of going on, rather than a clear per-
" ception of advantage. To know when to leave off is a great art in
' everything. If you can make your escape now, do not lose the oppor-
" tunity, but come over the first bridge that presents itself to your notice.
" I wait, however, in despair of being able to influence the Governor,
" whose immoveable walk-through-rivers disposition, which he inherits from
" his no-thoroughfare-path-papa, I too well remember. I ought, however,
" to say what I can to cheer him up in his troubles, though I only say these
" things about rivers to help him over the bridge if I can ; but he is such
" a neck-or-nothing man. . . . The whole machine of our family goes on
" pretty well, but I feel as if I were in a treadmill sometimes, obliged to
" go faster than I wish, and that if I did not keep step, I should be in
" danger of breaking my shins, or something worse."
" August 21, 1839. [To my mother.] . . All of us (except mamma' and
" the twigs), went to Hampton Court the other day. I went to meet Sir
" A. Callcott and some friends of his and mine. While we were comparing
" Dorigny's prints of the Cartoons with the originals, who should appear at
" the other end of the gallery but B. R. Haydon Esqre., swelling like a
" turkey-cock ; and, after some marching and counter-marching, without
" being noticed by any of the party, he went out with arms akimbo as
" grand as Pistol."
" September 30, 1839. [To my mother.] . . . Pray tell Palmer that I will
" talk to him about the drudgery he mentions which he says he will be glad
" to do, when he returns. It is a mistake, I believe, to suppose that any
" great progress can be made in poetic landscape unless the whole mind and
" time is devoted to it. He ought to take warning by my pettifogging prac-
" tice, lest he fail of accomplishing the best he is capable of, as I have fail'd.
" I say fail'd because I am too old to rally sufficiently to improve much."
The foregoing extracts contain, I think, much that is interesting. Mr.
Linnell represents even himself as condemned by expediency to a certain
line of art, from which he evidently desires to break away, and eventually
did break away. My father for his part, keenly sensitive at last to his own
narrow circumstances, is driven to suggest an expedient for bringing in
what, in one of his letters to Bayswater, he pathetically calls " small monies."
To this my grandfather replies, "I do not like it." Probably, nothing
short of the thought of his unpaid debt, and the recollection that the cost
of the homeward journey would nearly reach the appalling sum of ^50,

70

THE LIFE OF

would have driven the staunch Shoreham enthusiast to dream of " little
oil pictures and drawings painted in a day, at once from nature," as a
means of adding to his income. He is very properly advised not to think
of " doing anything of the pot-boiling description "; but rather " to teach for
money and take pains with some finished works for reputation."
Tempted no doubt by this same poverty, and naturally very fertile in
designing power, he seems'at one time to have contemplated "composing"
in his sketches, and he receives from Mr. Linnell some admirable counsel
touching the importance of not " injuring the veracity of a drawing from
nature." Part of the extract dated November 23, 1838, is particularly interesting,
as it touches on the vital and vexed question of realism in art, and the
extent to which nature may be transmuted in the mind without the
sacrifice of "truth" in its noblest and largest sense. My father's own
opinions on this point will have been partly gathered from the description
of his earlier work, and from the passage in the letter to Mr. Richmond
already quoted.
Mr. Linnell seems to have made up his mind that he was condemned
by his age, as well as by the demands of his large family, to a practice which
he twice characterizes as " pettifogging " ; but his ideal is far different, and
is made apparent by the advice he gives his son-in-law. He sees that the
study of "poetic landscape" will demand "the whole mind and time,''
and he longs to devote himself to more "spiritual art" than that which
he is forced to pursue.
Unfortunately, nearly the whole of the letters from my father and
mother to the family at Bayswater have been either lost or destroyed ; and
with them the written record , of their labours. Briefly epitomized, their
proceedings were as follows. Leaving their travelling companions at Rome
for a time, they journeyed southwards to Naples, which they saw " glittering
like a mosaic of gems, but with innate, living light from a sea of beryl."
Thence they removed to Pompeii, where they stopped a month, living in
one of the ancient buildings which had been occupied by some superin
tendent of the works who was then absent. If the sentiment of such a
place had wanted poetry or pathos, both would have been added by the
story of Glaucus and lone. This the travellers read for the first time in the
evenings, while the remote thunder of Vesuvius (then in eruption) shook
their door as if the dead, roused from their centuries of sleep by that solemn
sound, were once again seeking shelter in their desolate homes. At
Pompeii my father made many studies, and among them one of the
amphitheatre, which is a particularly pleasing work, and notable as showing
a complete mastery of technical difficulties, besides great knowledge. My
mother was equally industrious.

Vesuvius, 1838.

A Storm on the Cornish Coast.

SAMUEL PALMER.

71

By way of Corpo di Cava and various out-of-the-way places they
returned to Rome, the record of their journey being one of incessant
painting and the conquest of innumerable difficulties at the cost of a
Spartan self-denial.
In a letter from my father to Mr. Linnell, dated l'apignio, August 23,
1839, is the following passage :— " . . .As we are now on our homeward
" march and it will be important to finish our journey successfully, I am
" anxious to get the benefit of your advice as to our next movements ; as
" everything we do now will bear upon our London settlement and our
'' preparations for the exhibition next spring. On the one hand it appears
" important that, immediately on my return, I should begin one or two
" pictures of a moderate size (J perhaps), which, if successful, would be
" likely to bring me into notice ; and I am endeavouring at this moment to
" secure this point having just finished two most beautiful foreground
" subjects, which are at the same time highly poetical and full of the realiza-
" tion which connoisseurs look for. Now as I shall also, at the same time,
" have to teach and use all other means to get small monies, the sooner we
" are in London the better . . . On the other hand, our travelling expenses
" from England to Rome (to say nothing of Naples), came to ^50, and
" though we may come back rather cheaper, will be considerable ; and it is
" worthy of consideration whether, when on the spot at so great a cost, and
" where we may perhaps never be again, we ought not to seize the advantages
" held out to Anny in such a place as Florence, so as to enable her to make
" a small and very select set of recollections from the choice things there,
" which we can obtain nowhere else ; such as picked specimens of Andrea
" del Sarto, Masaccio, Fra Bartolomeo and John of Fiesole, which could not
" be done in less than three months. This would bring us to the end of
" November before leaving Florence, and land us in England at the begin-
" ning of January ; and then, though there would be two months before us
" for painting for the exhibition, this would not suffice, because of preparing
" our drawings for inspection &c, teaching perhaps, and other unforeseen
" obstacles; so that I should have little to exhibit but studies or drawings
" in water-colours ; but still we should have secured other advantages offered
" by Florence, which we have paid much to come at and may never reach
" again. I lay these two plans of proceeding before you ... I now earn-
" estly desire to do something effective for the exhibition next year which
" would give me standing as an artist, or at least widen my connection among
" the patrons of art. At the same time, I do not wish, having struggled
" hitherto conscientiously for the best, to throw away a great continental
" advantage . . . Now, when I speak of exhibition preparations, I do not
" mean to the exclusion of all possible means to get small cash in every way.
" Of course I shall be anxious immediately on my return to mount and put

72

THE LIFE OF

" the last touches to several drawings which I have with me, and which are
" ready for inspection, and to teach &c. &c. ; but I should like, as I have
" two f frames not much the worse for wear, to paint at least two really
" effective pictures, besides exhibiting some of my drawings. Now, whatever
" others can do, / cannot attempt this in a desolate, dirty house, such as
" mine was during Mrs. Hurst's administration [after Mary Ward's death],
" with clothes hanging to dry in the passage ; therefore I think and indeed
" feel sure that the only way will be, if the house is swept and garnished
" ready for us, to go into it at once with Anny. ..."
It will be readily seen from this letter that my father wished and
intended to earn a name not as a painter in water-colours, but a painter in
oils, This was always his ambition, and that he was always thwarted was
a source of constant regret to him.
At the end of two years the labourers returned from their " wedding
trip '' laden with the fruits of their toil — returned from a sunny and beauti
ful land to the dreary darkness of a London winter. Often and often my
father spoke of the contrast between the brilliant skies and the marble
buildings they had left behind, and the filthy Thames warehouses, looming
through the fog in which they landed. Indeed he ascribed to this change
the origin of the acute asthma which sorely troubled him in after life.
Although his early, career had been that of a hard worker not without
griefs and disappointments, and anxieties on account of his mental and
professional progress, these anxieties had little to do with worldly matters.
But now the studies he had once pursued for their own sake had to be
submitted to the touchstone of utility. He had before him the unspeak
ably weary struggle against the neglect and contempt to which education
and gentle manners only serve to make a poor man painfully sensitive.
Every old anxiety was redoubled and multiplied. Will his allegiance to the
principles so enthusiastically followed ten years before survive the grip of
poverty, or will they melt away (as such principles are wont to do) under
the enervating warmth of popular favour bought at the usual price of
that article ? An answer is found partly in memorandum books— in the
accounts and other private papers of the next twenty years, and partly in
the works which were produced in the same period.
For the first year or two after his return to England my father's income
was increased by the sale, at a good price, of the sets of prints of the Sistine
Chapel Michael Angelos engraved by Mr. Linnell, which had been taken to
Rome and coloured from the originals, and also by the sale of my mother's
copies from the Old Masters. When this source of supply was exhausted,
my father, in accordance with the intention expressed in the Papignio letter,
fell back upon his oil-painting. He intended to take up the thread of his
Shoreham studies, and to pursue them with the great additional knowledge

SAMUEL PALMER. 73
and experience he had gained in Italy. But whether the two years of
almost unremitted water-colour practice had, for the time being, made the
other method difficult or uncongenial, or whether (as 1 imagine was the
case) discouraging personal influences besides the influences of other
untoward circumstances were at work, the oil pictures of this time (judging
from all I have seen) were weak and timid to a degree surprising to those
who are familiar with the crisp touch, glowing colour, and bold impasto of
the best Shoreham panels. The composition might be graceful, the light
and shade well studied, but the love of higher qualities than these— the
" double vision " so peculiarly evident in those works appeared no longer.
That matters were not prospering, is shown by the solicitude with which
every trivial item both of receipt and expenditure was entered in the
accounts, and by a feverish anxiety to increase his teaching connection.
In the midst of the entries for 1840, appears this significant passage: —
"Supposing lessons stop, and nothing more is earned — avoid snuff, two
•' candles, sugar in tea, waste of butter and soap . . . But it is more difficult
" at present to get than to save. Query. Go into the country for one month
" to make little drawings for sale ? '' Two candles a night are not a remark
ably liberal allowance for a hard-working artist and his wife, but he is
prepared to go back to the still narrower rations of the " Epic Poet." Alas,
for the "Cheat Reads, ' of which he had spoken so hopefully in a letter to
Dr. Williams from Italy !
I am glad to say that he did not go into the country for the purpose of
making "little drawings for sale"; but in September 1844, he passed
some time at Lady Stephen's in Dorsetshire, teaching, and painting some
pictures which did not sell. The examples I have of these are highly
finished, but are monotonous in colour and generally uninteresting.
Two unconnected memoranda in 1842 have, when taken in conjunc
tion, a certain grim irony. At the head of the entries of the year he
writes, "Income, God willing, of 1842 >J«. He giveth food to all flesh,
for His mercy endureth for ever." Later on, " Our professional experi-
" ence, 1842. February 3, I went to the British Gallery, and found both my
" pictures and one of Anny's rejected. March. Mr. Ruskin and others were
" shown our drawings. Mr. Nasmyth was to name me as a teacher to
"Admiral Otway. I offered Miss B— — , Addison Road, to teach one
" pupil for 105. per annum. [This was a school.] Went to British Artists,
" and found one picture hung near the ceiling, another rejected, and Anny's
"Job rejected. Mine were the same pictures I sent to the B : Gallery,
" for the new frames for which I had paid £$ 8s."
This struggle with difficulties and the attendant temptations and mis
givings might possibly have been averted. My father was wont to lament
in after years that a little encouragement and help at this critical time

74 THE LIFE OF
would have enabled him to paint in oil from the figure, to acquire a more
complete mastery over solid colour and, as he so earnestly wished, to
follow the career of an oil painter. But he met, instead, with discourage
ments and obstacles without end. Deliberate promises of such help
which had been made to him again and again were disregarded, and the
golden dreams he had dreamed under the bright Italian noon faded
away into the cold realities of a disappointed life.
It may be well to mention in passing a notable exception among
the weak handling and colour to which I alluded as characteristic of some
of the oil pictures finished after the return from Italy. The Rising of the
Skylark is a small panel picture which was painted con amore ; and
although it was completed some years later than the period we have
reached, it was begun before all hope of a return to oil painting was
abandoned. Foreshadowed by a sepia sketch of a much earlier date, and
followed some time afterwards by an etching bearing the same title,
though of a different composition, this little work shows that the Shore
ham power and the feeling for the most poetic aspects of nature had not
failed ; but, although forced to lie dormant, were always ready to awake in
their full strength under genial circumstances.
Upon his own birthday (the 27th January) in 1842, my father's eldest
child was born. He named him "Thomas More" after the great Chancellor,
whose portrait had hung at Shoreham, "cheek by jowl " with the portrait
of Bishop Fisher, to " frown away vice and levity and infidelity." The
event led to a temporary migration from Marylebone to Thatcham in
Berkshire, where the family remained from August to October, much to
my father's benefit. Here he painted two water-colours which were ex
hibited the following year at the Gallery of the Old Society ; and the
visit led to the production of an admirable drawing which appeared at
the same exhibition under a title whose accuracy no one appears to have
challenged. At Donnington, Berkshire ; the Birthplace of Chaucer, a work
now in the possession of the Linnell family, is without exception one of
the best examples of my father's subdued manner that I have seen. It
seems astounding that a painter as accomplished as this drawing proves
him to have been should ever have been concerned about " small monies "
or the number of " dips " allowable for an evening's study.
He had now drifted perforce more and more into the practice of
water-colours ; and in 1 843 his future career was virtually determined by
his election as Associate of the Old Society. As my father was one of
those who are liable to be depressed by failure and exhilarated by success
far more than is usual, it is probable that Napoleon after Austerlitz was
less elated than he, when the Secretary's letter arrived. At last the
painter had achieved a standing in his profession, and his name was

SAMUEL PALMER. 75
enrolled among some of the elect of art. His pleasure was enhanced by
the sale from the Society's gallery to The Art Union (then, by the l>\e, an
illegal institution), of a drawing entitled Evening— the Ruins of a Walled
City. The ^30 he received for this work was for him, at thai time, a
large price.
In September 1843, he again visited North Wales; and not only the
studies he made there, but the copious memoranda show to what purpose
he had employed his time, in spite of discouragement and failure, since
the return from Italy. It did not suffice him that he could skilfully choose
and accurately copy any beautiful portion of landscape or foreground.
He had acquired and constantly exercised the power of analyzing what he
saw and of arranging the whole of the phenomena under the laws which he
discovered and studied. He also made illustrated notes on detached
sheets of paper which he accumulated in a special portfolio labelled
" Written Memoranda," many more being secured in his never-failing
sketch-book. In these researches consisted one branch of his artistic
studies. The other, and in his opinion by far the most important branch
involved the solution of the difficulties connected with composition and
design. Here, on the high altar of his own ideal, was practically sacrificed
the best of all his other researches put together ; and also that " potentiality
of growing rich " which has allured many and many an enthusiast away
from his own track into the more pleasant paths of popularity.
The sketching expeditions were not made in at all a luxurious manner.
The apparatus carried was as simple as it was complete. A deal case or a
portfolio slung round the shoulders with a strap held a good supply of
paper, together with two large but very light wooden palettes coated with
home-made white enamel and set with thick clots of colour so prepared
as to be readily moved by the brush or the finger. A light hand-basket
held a change or two of linen, reserve colours, an old campstool which
had seen service in Italy and, when necessary, the lunch or dinner. The
coat was an accumulation of pockets in which were stowed away the all-
important snuff-box, knives, chalks, charcoal, coloured crayons, and sketch
books, besides a pair of large, round, neutral-tint spectacles made for near
sight. These were carried specially for sunsets and the brightest effects on
water; and, together with a small diminishing mirror, completed the equip
ment. The minimum of the plainest clothes and boots heavily nailed
furthered the sketcher's object, which was to travel on unfrequented tracks
or mountain paths, in any company or none, and utterly unfettered. A good
constitution and the training of his youth made him indifferent to rough
quarters and rough diet. He writes, " In exploring wild country I have
" been for a fortnight together uncertain each day whether I shall get a bed
" under cover at night ; and about midsummer I have repeatedly been

76 THE LIFE OF
" walking all night to watch the mystic phenomena of the silent hours."
He seemed as much at home in clambering down a Welsh mountain
towards dusk after a hard day's work, guided only by the roar of a
neighbouring torrent, as in joining the evening gossip in the chimney-
corner of a village inn, after explaining to some who took him for a travelling
pedlar that he had nothing to show. He tells how he read a seven-volume
edition of Sir Charles Grandison for the second time while weather-bound .
in a wild district in Wales ; how he foregathered with Crabb Robinson
whom he met on one of these occasions ; or how he lay in bed while his
drenched clothes were being dried for him at a kitchen fire of the inn
where he had taken shelter.
He sketched rapidly, though not so rapidly as in after years ; while to
save time, he used a great deal of warm middle-tint paper and body-colour,
a practice he eschewed in most of his finished drawings. Many of the
sketches show a more or less advanced preparation in black chalk or
pencil, or in a colour such as bistre, used with a pen. Pens, indeed, of
all sizes were resorted to as at Shoreham, from the little crow-quill to
the reed. His execution varied from delicate stipple or most minute
draughtsmanship to the bold sweep of a brush two inches broad, filled
from the thick masses of colour on the wooden palettes. These large
clots of easily-moved colour were a distinguishing peculiarity in his
practice, both in and out of doors ; and he had many small china
saucers which he filled to the brim with the pigments of which he
used the most, so prepared as to set, without .becoming hard. He
recommends an advanced pupil to take out " whole saucers full of
colour, great reed pens, vast brushes, and bottles of brown ink," but he
takes care at the same time to reiterate his watch-word — " Exactness." He
seldom attempted to attain in one sketch more than the pith or kernel of
the subject; but upon a separate paper, or on the margin, he made
memoranda of appropriate figures, cattle, or clouds which happened to
appear, together with notes explaining the deficiencies of the sketch in
peculiarly subtle or exquisite passages. The immense mass of material
and knowledge he accumulated therefore is not to be measured so much
by the actual sketches, as by the system of shorthand notes (as we may call
them) in pen, brush, and pencil, which almost invariably accompanied
them. These notes he was able to read and make use of many years
afterwards, and in a peculiar manner.
In the course of a minute description of his sketching method given to
a friend, he says, " Very transitory effects, e.g. sunsets. These are generally
" quite lost through trying to do too much. Long before a palette can be
" taken out of the portfolio, the cloud has passed off the mountain, or the
" golden gleam has become dingy shade. Therefore a scratch with pencil in

SAMUEL PALMER. 77
" the sketch-book is the first thing — writing what there is no time to thaw.
" Then get out the crayons ; and with the scene before you, and the reniem
" brance fresh, try to make something like it. If this comes like, it is
" enough ; if not, keep it with the water-colour. It is best done small -half
" or a quarter size of your portfolio paper [probably \ Imperial] is enough.
" Then make a separate, careful outline of the scene, going on if jmi have
" time, and adding the local colour &c. &c.
" It is surprising how few sketches of transitory effects painters bring
" home which, after a lapse of time, reproduce the effects to their memory.
" Perhaps because they do not confine themselves to the characteristics of
" the effect — that very something which made them get out their paper ;
" perhaps because they go on with it after the effect goes off, trying to get in
" some detail, instead of taking another piece of paper. I can paint better
" from my pencil memoranda of effects than from any other. If an effect
" be very fine, I think we should, beside what I have recommended,
" make a little coloured sketch of it immediately on going home.
" Effects, less transitory, of sunshine on beautiful matter. Little, careful
" sketches about \ of the portfolio size, in water-colours on white paper.
" How many beautiful recollections might be brought home from a fine
" country, if we would but limit our attempts to the measure of our time and
" means, and try, at all events, to secure the characteristic features and hues,
" instead of making ambitious attempts where time and opportunity are
" small." The following note is taken from my father's commonplace-book, and
seeing that it was written at a time when, in spite of the encouragement of
his election as Associate of the Old Society, his circumstances were by no
means prosperous — when, in fact, he was in the midst of a fight to make
both ends meet, it will bring to mind that old Shoreham determination to
pursue art for its own sake : —
" Monday, April 17, 1843. — Taking-in day at the Water Colour. Thoughts
" as to my next year's painting if my unworthy life be spared. Try to make
" my things first Poetic ; second Effective.
" POETIC. " EFFECTIVE.
"By doing subjects I love and greatly " By studying phenomena in the country,
" desire to do. BRITISH ; ROMANTIC ; " laying the great stress upon small— very
"CLASSIC ; IDEAL." " small sketches of effects ; always making,
"at the same time, at least a small pencil
"outline of the matter; and that I may
"not be solicitous to produce showable
' "pictures in the country, let me now, at
"home, do all I can for the next Water-
] "colour exhibition."
The last of the notes written in Payne Knight's Principles of Taste, and

7S THE LIFE OF
quoted already, forms a somewhat pathetic commentary upon this. The
resolution was not without a courage of its own, for my father knew from
experience that the kind of art he expresses his intention of following
was either repudiated by nine-tenths of those to whom an artist has to look
for his daily bread, or put aside as we should put aside a book in Sanscrit.
The Romantic and Ideal were dangerous reeds to lean upon even in
the year of grace 1843. But sanguine, simple-minded enthusiasm, though
meeting again and again with its rebuff, revived just as often, and clung
just as unreasonably round the old loves of the mind.
Early in 1844 a daughter was born to my father, and whether or no the
happiness of this event led him to look on all things with more cheerful
ness than usual it is certain that when he came to the then peaceful and
quiet neighbourhood of Guildford, in fine September weather, both his
notes and his sketches spoke of unusual splendour of illumination and
variety of colour. As these notes are of considerable interest if they are
taken as forming part of an artist's mental career — part of the history of the
evolution of his own peculiar manner, I will quote some passages : —
" Guildford 1844. The lights in nature are more distinct from the shadows
" (however modified by reflection) than in pictures. The shadows are very
" deep relatively to the lights, yet seem clear and full of reflected light.
" This quality is worth a most serious effort. It is much seen in shady lanes.
" The want of it gives a dismal, indoor look to the picture. Cast shadows
" across lanes &c. are not hard, or cut out, or all of a depth — some very
" dark and sharp winding up to the emphasis against the brilliant light.
" With these are intermixed tender, transparent shadows, and half-shadows,
" in every variety of intermixture and gradation. But the first thing that
" struck me on coming here was the POSITIVENESS, INTENSE
"BRIGHTNESS, and WARMTH of the LIGHTS; and that the
" SHADOWS are full of REFLECTED LIGHT, though very deep."
Next to this we find a note upon the margin of a slight but pretty sketch of
distant country basking in quiet, autumnal sunshine, and seen over a green hill
whose trees cast a maze of shadows on the smooth grass : — "The cast shadows
" travelling over the figure-like ground develop the forms and emphasize
" them. They do not so here, from the slightness ; but in nature, the living
" chequer- work of the shadows and their pungent lines often develop and
" emphasize the principal forms, while they light up the whole with a dance
" and dazzle of splendour." The writer has evidently become fully aware
that the splendour and yet superlative delicacy and variety of nature's
colouring, where nothing is crude and nothing out of place, can only be
faintly adumbrated even by the most skilful and daring colourist ; and it
will be seen by his subsequent memoranda and practice, that he was also
aware of one potent cause of this unapproachable splendour — the transmis-

SAMUEL PALM Eh\ 79
sion of light through coloured objects to the eye. This is one of the
reasons, if not the chief reason, of a characteristic arrangement of subject he
affected in after years.
The notes continue as follows: — "The shapes of the focal lights and
" touches must be thoroughly understood and drawn to give any chance of
" imitating the vivid splendour of nature's lights. The shadows in nature
" are very deep compared with the wonderful light : and themselves, never-
" theless, are clear, beautiful, and clean in colour, and full of reflected light,
" warm or cool. The smiting of the light upon the shade is accompanied
" by its opposite, viz. endless play and gradation. Nature seemed
" WARMER than ever, but with a perpetual interplay of greys.
"Some of the conditions of the glitter in sunshine IMPORTANT :
" Holes of dark. Cast shadows ; as well as the incessant play of the
" common shadows.
" To a black or dark animal and a white one, all the landscape — except-
" ing stubble fields and suchlike— will be a MIDDLE TINT.
" Glitter of a white or very light object will be helped by its SQUARE-
" NESS of shapes, GENUINE MIDDLE TINT of its BACKGROUND,
" a mass of something relieving dark near it, and the play of CAST
" SHADOWS and HOLES of dark, which are the enrichment of nature's
" breadth. These, I think, govern and mass the varieties of colour in
" banks of wood &c, and make smooth, enamelly hills precious."
These and many like observations appear to have been condensed, and
the result entered as follows on a slip of cardboard : — " 1S44. WHITE in
" FULL POWER from the first. Remember blazing days wherein it makes
" middle-tint colours in sunshine seem dark, AND GRAYS COOLER
" THAN WHITE. WHITE NOT TONED WITH ORANGE, but in
" juxtaposition with the PRIMITIVES.

DEADLY DARK BROWNS LAID ON AT OXCE.

" FLASHES of LIGHT, or BLOW of DARK
" To get vast space, what a world of power does aerial perspective open !
" From the dock-leaf at our feet, far, far away to the isles of the ocean.
"And thence— far thence, into the abyss of boundless light. O! what
" heavenly grays does this suggest !

" Stothard spoke of the value of flat tints. One flat tint relieves very
distinctly from another."
There then follows a list of things to be attained in his work or im
pressed on his memory, and among them the following "Think, more than
work upon distances." " If spared to September, 1845, a batch of imitation.'
" Rigid imitation of relative and neighbour darks and colour."

80 THE LIFE OF
From Guildford were sent many letters to the little boy Thomas More.
Some were elaborately written, regardless of time and trouble, in Roman type,
to serve as early reading lessons ; and one of them describing a fair on St.
Martha's Hill (the subject of a study or two) is illustrated with very pretty
and careful little pencil drawings. All show the same anxiety that the
child should give his heart to God and learn to love wisdom.
From Surrey my father went on to Wales, and there continued his
painting and memoranda for three weeks. Pecuniarily the results of the
year's work were unsatisfactory, his income for 1844 being smaller than in
any year since his return from Italy.
In 1845 he spent a great deal of time at Margate, where his family
remained from May till October, and this period was spent to much purpose,
chiefly in studying effects and sunsets. In addition to this he passed upwards
of a month at Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire ; where he appears
to have carried out his intention of devoting himself to " A batch of
Imitation." A Farm-yard near Risborough deserves the heartiest praise
as a true, graceful, and unaffected study from nature — lovely English
scenery, in its most sober aspect. The colouring is gentle-,- tne execution
faultless, and there is no special appeal to exceptional qualities of mind —
no hobby ridden into the china-shop of popular ignorance. The subject is
dear to all lovers of the country, and its treatment (from the flock of sheep
in the foreground to the downs in the distance) will not fail to please those
who love art also. This drawing was exhibited in 1846 — one of seven
English subjects, the seven exhibited in the preceding year having been all
Italian. This is a circumstance that is probably more than mere accident.
Imitation cannot be achieved unless the object to be imitated is at hand.
Moreover, Italian colour and Italian themes, dear as they were to the
artist, were perhaps unsaleable at a time when he was little known. It was
possibly just about this time that my father began to turn over in his mind
what he calls " Designs prudentially considered." Designs, mark ; not
scraps of nature more or less skilfully transferred to canvas or paper,
without previous refining in the mind — I might almost say, in the heart.
Some undated memoranda under the title I have just mentioned run as
follows : — " ist. SUBJECTS. A subject should be interesting either from
" its BEAUTY, or ASSOCIATIONS, or BOTH ; OBJECTS q*SCENES,
" intrinsically BEAUTIFUL.
" Claude brought together things in which all men delight. Majestic
" trees, sunny skies, rivers with gentle falls, venerable ruins and extensive
" distances. His ground was soft for pasture or repose. The accident which
" most quickens such beauty, is LIGHT.
" 2nd. SUBJECTS in which ELEMENTS, or their combinations or
" secondaries, are the principal matters, as such in which are expressed

SAMUEL PALMER. 81
" DEW ; SHOWERS or MOISTURE ; THE DEEP-TONED, FERTIL-
" IZING RAIN-CLOUD ; DROUGHT, with its refuge of deep, hollow
"shade, and a cold spring ; the BROOK; THE GUSHING SPRING,
" or FOUNTAIN ; AERIAL DISTANCE.
" 3rd. LIGHT either produced by its great enforcer cast shadow, or
" by great halved opposites, as when the sun is in the picture.
" 4th. DARKNESS, with its focus of coruscating light, and a moon or
" lanthorn. The precious and latent springs of poetry are to be found
" here. " FIGURES, which in landscape are an adjunct, should if possible be
" in ACTION, and TELL a STORY.

" PRUDENTIALLY it is important (1) to ATTRACT the EYE.
" These attract the eye— BROAD EFFECT ; STRONG CONTRASTS,
" as warm and cool, bright light and deep shade ; VIVACITY ;
" SPARKLE ; FRESHNESS ; EMPTY and FULL.
" (2) TO FIX THE ATTENTION by FULNESS and INTRICACY ;
" (3) TO AWAKEN SYMPATHY by doing what WE STRONGLY
" LOVE.
" (4) TO DELIGHT by close IMITATION, at least on the points which
" first meet the eye, and by EXECUTION."
The reader will no doubt see that, in the case of an artist such as I
have been trying to describe, considerable difficulty was likely to arise by
his endeavouring to awaken sympathy by painting what he strongly loved,
that is, the " Romantic and Ideal," and by attempting to incorporate with
it " close imitation " and glib execution. We shall find in the works by
which he is best known neither imitation nor execution in the ordinary
sense ; but the foregoing notes, carefully studied, point to the conclusion
that, with the eclectic taste often co-existing with wide knowledge, their
writer was capable of loving very strongly widely different things — things
different alike from the Shoreham panels and the later Red Hill imagina
tions — and of extending his vision to either pole of art.
There is a simplicity in these memoranda — a taking it for granted that
the public would respond to his appeals and concessions, and learn to
love what he loved, is not without pathos. It seems (to quote Payne
Knight's words once again) that he still " believed in art (however
foolishly)," and " believed in men as he read of them in books."
In one of the old note-books will be found the following : — " April 1845.
" When huffed by bad hanging retreat for strength, not to popular style,
" but to NATURE. . . . Plan of 1845 D.V. Paint from Effect and Colour
" sketches. An elegant subject for Florence frame in hope of SCREEN,1
1 A coveted position at the Society's Gallery.

82 THE LIFE OF
" Carrara mountains and distant Florence. Twilight, blue cloud Welsh effect,
"... A scheme for next exhibition D.V., after my annual comparison of
" my works with others of W.C.S. exhibition. Effects independently of
" subject matter, i. Cool sunrise with sun. 2. Do, without sun, in \ light.
" Italian coast like Callcott's Spezzia. 3. Effect like my little Bay of Baits,
" being an attempt to do it better. 4. The tender moonlight seen at Mr.
" Calvert's." Part of the notes made at Princes Risborough are of especial import : —
" Collins's, Princes Risboro', Bucks, 1845. After having studied here for a
" month, my general impression with regard to effective painting and the
" conduct of picture is this.
" The bask of beautiful landscape in glorious sunlight is in nature
" perfectly delicious and congenial with the mind and heart of man, but the
" imitative power is so limited — particularly so as to the lowless of the light
" pigments with which we imitate — that the above, when upon paper or
" canvas, should perhaps only be considered as the corpse which is to be
" ANIMATED. "The ANIMATOR is CHIAROSCURO. HOLES of DARK,
" BOLD CAST SHADOWS— the same PLAYFUL and INTRICATE
" sometimes, when cast from trees like (blueish) soft, cool gray, blotting
" or dappling over the finished matter (figures most beautiful under this
" effect). Where figures or sheep come in nearly front light against holes
" of shade under trees they are like plates or bassi-relievi of wrought gold.
" If it be judicious to follow the manner of working sketches from
" nature in the working of pictures, then remember, that though the sketch
" becomes finished beyond comparison sooner, yet that the process seems
" slow and the means delicate. The use of a violent colour immediately
" shocks one, and it is dappled about and melted into delicacies.
" PROCESS. 1. Chiaroscuro copied from sketch of effect. 2. Some
" realization of the solid matter, in which delicate drawing must take the
" lead, and ever accompany colouring. The working up of the pattern
" and textures is a slow work, even in drawing from nature, and this I think
" should not be hurried.
" How is that wholesome, clean, and unpicturelike appearance to be
" obtained, which on every side delights one in every country walk ? ist
" by a more fresco-like treatment, not spreading juicy colour too widely.
" Secondly perhaps, also by remembering that the greater proportion of
" matter out of doors is a medium far removed from the coldest blue and
" the most gaudy yellow and orange. Hence a gray cottage side and a
" yellow tree tell in nature and have their just value. Thirdly by patience,
" in ripening the masses of illuminated matter ; for what would nature be

SAMUEL PAL. MER. 83
" without its delicate playfulness of things into eacli other ; its infinity and
" endless suggestiveness. Now this can be imitated in a hurry neither in
" copying out of doors nor in painting at home. Fourthly by keeping the
" variety of the palette ALIVE. For a bit of nature, however small, refuses
" to be copied by any impatient dab or idle spread of one colour. Think
" of a gray stem with lichens and mosses, rich as a cabinet of gems, or
" think of a single piece of rock. Now how contemptibly do we imitate
" this with a few dabs and patches of colour.
" And all this is only one little corner of Art. The conclusion of the
" whole matter is this, that it is almost impossible to do rightly or wisely.
" That conceit, self-complacency, and indolence, should be incessantly
" hunted out of the inner man. That everything we do should be done
" with all our might, and that rest and recreation should be proportionably
" separated and entire. What a blessed thing is sleep to a mind always on
" the rack for improvement ! "
Not many years before this was written the writer was speaking of
" glimpses of perfumed and enchanted midsummer twilight," of " nooks "
spiritually beheld, and of his being "so inspired" that he worked as
confidently as if he were Michael Angelo himself upon a design that had,
just before, caused him " dreadful suffering."
The Risborough memoranda foreshadow what we may undoubtedly
regard as an approaching change in his practice — a change well marked
and possibly prudential, but one (if I read it aright) which did not affect
his inmost ideal. He appears, at this period of his life, to have been
swayed by two contending impulses ; the one brought about by a very
keen admiration of nature as it is viewed simply by the outward eye ; the
other, by the action of a different and to him a more natural kind of
vision which added to nature a supernatural beauty. For the time being,
" juicy colour " seems to be forsworn altogether ; and although he delights
as much as ever in " the bask of beautiful landscape in glorious sunlight "
he is becoming far more keenly sensitive than of old to subtle ways of
enhancing such splendour and securing some of the variety of nature's
colouring by means of a palette kept " alive." Nevertheless, many of the
water-colours that followed show a distinct and well-marked stage of
transition from early enthusiasm to a circumspect prudence, partly brought
about, no doubt, by the discovery of the unpopularity of enthusiasm for
nearly everything he esteemed, and partly by the difficulty of converting
pictures above the comprehension of the average art " patron " into beef
and mutton. No doubt he realized ruefully enough that most of the
qualities he was attempting to secure, most of the delicate subtleties of
nature's forms, and the exquisite variety and interplay of nature's colouring,
together with all the laws and the principles he was so laboriously c 2

84 THE LIFE OF
mastering, were as utterly beyond the comprehension of that patron, as of
/ a blind man.
In letters of a far later date written after a good many more of life's
bitter lessons had been mastered, we find him asking whether sight is
/considered the lowest of the senses, that its proper culture is so much
neglected ; and he speaks of the "illiterate eye of a senior wrangler."
A good example of the temporary change in his practice is a water-
colour exhibited in 1845, and entitled Tivoli and the Cypresses of the Villa
D'Este. It is a replica of one of the best and richest of the Italian studies,
but so much of the vigour and spirit has been evaporated that the drawing
looks as if it had suffered years of exposure to bright sunlight.
Another of the memorandum-books contains a full and careful record of
my father's labours about this time as a teacher, and we find that he had now
what some have delighted in calling a " large and fashionable connection."
In this branch of his calling, as in all others, his energy, system, and order
were conspicuous, and where he met with good material to work upon he
was proportionably successful. But although, after 1845, there was an
improvement in his income chiefly brought about by this teaching (the
sale of drawings being small and the prices low), his fight was still a hard
one, and his expenses were increasing apace in spite of luxuries of all kinds
having been ruthlessly cut off. At one end of this book, in bold but now
faded writing, are extracts made at Shoreham, from Shakespeare, Spenser,
and other poets, with remarks upon them ; and at the other end is a list of
engagements with pupils, the amounts received, together with some informa
tion from my father's friend, Mr. F. O. Finch, touching the starvation terms
usually arranged with schools. In the middle of the book are columns of
personal accounts laboriously and minutely entered in pencil, but anything
but perspicuous, and remarkably unbusinesslike ; this being invariably
the case when my father attempted such matters. Among other items is
one of dZ2~i received from Messrs. Bradburyi.and Evans for a set of four
illustrations to the first edition of Charles Dickens's Letters from Italy, an
undertaking which led to a brief correspondence with the author.
It is difficult to imagine a more dreary commentary upon my father's
life than this old book of memoranda and cash accounts. It shows how
that life began in studiousness— without idleness, yet with leisure to see,
j to read, to think, and be happy ; then, how it drifted little by little into a
determined and continuous struggle against adverse circumstances ; with
the ever-present fear that if, through illness or otherwise, that struggle were
for an instant remitted, the lost ground could never be recovered.
Taking up the book next in order to this we find the story saddening still
more. It opens with many extracts (copied as- before, at Shoreham, with
painstaking elaboration and evident delight) from favourite works of

SAMUEL PALMER. 85
devotion, and from religious discourses. Then we come to a " List of
pictures sold " from 1843 to 1853, including several in oil— altogether five
and forty works1 at an average price a little short of /,"i6. Against
this income, were to be debited the expenses of a London house and house
hold I It can thus be realized how much depended on his unremitted
exertions as a teacher, and upon good health and spirits. As has been well
said, " The most painful and frequent form of the inter-dependence of dual
" conditions, is when a man must have money to get health (by rest and
" ease) and must have health to get money." -
That my father regarded his teaching as a necessity from which he
would have escaped if he could is shown by this extract from a letter to
my mother. "June 14, 1847 . . . What use I could have made in the
" country of these three weeks of fine weather ! If I could but stand the
" loss of the first disentanglement from teaching I think it would be a
" hundred times overpaid ; but it is full of difficulties."
Returning to the book, we find at the end of some notes of a doctor's
attendance on More, and probably connected with it in the writer's mind
by the anticipation of the inevitable bill, these words : —
" I must, D.V., strike out at once into a NEW STYLE. SIMPLE
" SUBJECT : BOLD EFFECT ; BROAD RAPID EXECUTION ;
" rounding the chiaroscuro without timidity as to blotting out little lights,
" when the leaving them precise and sharp would involve premature
" niggle — using, the Globe Principle with power and boldness. On
" Tuesday, March 3rd, [1846] I called, as I had long intended, at Mr.
" Colnaghi's. I was no sooner there, than Mr. Scott asked me if I had
" heard from Mr.  to whom he had spoken in my favour respecting
" Mr.  's sons at Willesden. I called on Mr.  coming home-
" wards. He gave me a note to the tutor, Mr. Clarke, and I was engaged.
" I gave the first lesson Saturday March 7. If DIVINE PROVIDENCE
" PLEASE, how easily is employment obtained. October 8, I have had
" the above teaching ever since, blessed be God."
On the other side of the same leaf as the foregoing entries of 1846 is
this: "December 15, 1847. My dear daughter Mary Elizabeth died at
" 25 minutes to 6 p.m. The above was written on the evening of her death."
Eleven days later, my father wrote below this the particulars of the child's
last illness. It is a sad, simple story of suffering borne by a mere baby with
touching patience ; and also, as it seems, of the incompetence of the doctors
who might with a little more attention have saved her life. The story ends
as follows :—". . . . Her mother was sitting at the end of the bed when Mrs.
1 A good number of the drawings are of a size then a favourite one with the artist and
known to him as " Little Longs" or "L.L." They measured from 16 x 7J to 16J x 7J.
2 Etching and Etchers. P. G. Hamerton.

86 THE LIFE OF SAMUEL PALMER.
" Linnell said ' I think she is gone.' Anny put her face close to Mary's, but
" could hear no sound of breathing. Her eyes were open and fixed, but her
" face turned deadly pale .... SHE WAS DEAD. Mrs. Linnell closed
" her eyes. The last I saw of her dear gray eyes was in the afternoon, when I
" watched them. The lids closing a little over them made it seem like a
" mournful and clouded sunset. She had appeared for the most part un-
" conscious for two or three days, but on the morning of the day she died
" Anny was going to bed, when she held up one trembling arm and then the
" other. Anny put her head down between them, when she held her tightly
" round the neck for about a minute, and seemed to be thus taking a last
" leave of her mother. She had done so to me about two days before.
" She bore her sufferings and took her physic with the greatest patience,
" saying in the early part of her illness. ' I will take it to please you, dear
" Papa,' and sometimes said the same to her Mama before I came up.
" Six weeks back from this evening, Sunday, 26th December, we spent a
" happy afternoon together, reading Schmidt's story of Antony, and before
" she went to bed she was playing at magic music . . . . "
My father's agony as he wrote these words must be gauged not by the
ordinary standard of susceptibility to mental pain. What he felt was an
intense, ceaseless, and insufferable torture to which, but for that one hope
of ultimate reunion which forms so strong and beautiful a feature of
Christianity, death would have been far preferable. His grief was also
the harder to bear by means of his almost childish inability to restrain it.
He had to go about his work and to keep his teaching engagements with
eyes bleared and a voice often choked by sorrow.
The poor baby had been her father's pet, for she was unusually gentle
and affectionate, and intelligent far beyond her years. Unspeakable
dreariness seemed to drop upon the house like a black pall when the
golden little head and cheery voice were there no longer. That staunch
old friend Mr. Calvert did his best to console the mourners and spent
every evening with them, but at last they determined to leave Marylebone,
and in March, 1848 they removed to i.a, Victoria Road, Kensington — an
old detached cottage overlooking the Riding School.

CHAPTER IV
1848 TO lS6l
The removal to Kensington in the spring of 1848 was a wise step.
The little house in Marylebone was now in the midst of surroundings
among which few professional men would caie to be found, and to the
clay soil my father attributed much of his ill-health since his return from
Italy. The chief benefit of the removal was that though it increased his
rdistance from one or two of the companions of his youth it brought him
into the very midst of an artistic circle whence arose invaluable friendships.
Moreover, Kensington Gardens formed a better apology for the country
than dank Regent's Park, and gave him some opportunities (such as they
were) of studying foliage and sylvan effects.
Having wavered between Yorkshire and the south of England in
choosing the place for his summer campaign his old prejudice against the
North prevailed, and he spent the greater part of July in Cornwall.
Here, on this and other occasions, he accumulated a large number of
pencil, chalk, and water-colour sketches of the coast, including a three
weeks' series of sunsets painted each day with precisely the same fore
ground of sea and rock ; " a piece of study " which he afterwards quoted
as having been of great value to him. The sunsets were boldly and very
rapidly executed, some on white, and some on tinted paper ; and for this
work he wore the large neutral-tint spectacles. Such of these studies as I
have seen are skilful ; and particularly so in the most difficult part — the
scintillating track of sunlight upon the water. In the whole of this Cornish
work Mr. Linnell's ideal of studying from nature is realized ; that is,
the end in view is attained " by skill rather than hard labour "— by " a
perception of the principles upon which nature delights." There is not a
touch too much, and every touch is as significant as the symbols of
stenography. The knowledge gained by this especial attention to sunsets
over the sea was afterwards utilized in many works ; among others, in
Robinson Crusoe ; St. Paul landing in Italy ; and The Brother come home
from Sea.
On the 17th of December (almost the anniversary of little Mary's
death) my paternal grandfather died, being then seventy-three years old-
Writing of this loss with the characteristic freedom with which my father
spoke of his emotions he says :— "The first gush of tears came with the

88 THE LIFE OF
" thought, ' How he loved my childhood's soul and MIND — how he
" laboured to improve them, sitting in the house and walking in
" the fields ! ' "
In 1848 nearly two-thirds of my father's income were derived from
teaching. His drawings, considering the time, and thought, and devotion he
lavished upon them were still selling at almost absurdly unprofitable prices
— prices which were kept down as much by his want of courage as want of
capital, although he was occasionally comforted by friends' assurances that
they were " moderate." He says however, " This year I made a great
advance in the estimation of artists by my mottled-sky drawing begun at
Margate." He was perhaps at this time not fully aware that the estima
tion of artists is no gauge whatever of the estimation of the public ; but
had he been so, he would have far preferred the former. This notable
" Margate Mottle " as he called it, is to be met with elsewhere amongst his
designs and memoranda.
The drawing alluded to was not sold (in spite of the high estimation of
artists), and is now in my keeping. 1 The execution is somewhat slight, but
the composition and light and shade are pleasing. The sun sets in the
midst of that beautiful dappled glory sometimes described as a " mackerel
sky." Tall and graceful middle-distant trees cast their shadows over the
cattle which are cooling themselves in a mill-pond after the day's heat, and
over wheat reddening for an early harvest. Nestling beneath the trees and
in their deepest shade sleeps the old mill ; and beyond them stretches a
wild, woodland country with hills that, here and there, seem to attain to the
dignity of mountains. The sky (although it is luminous), judged by the
standard of my father's later works is somewhat faint and vapid in colour,
giving the impression of the fading of some pigment such as Indian yellow,
which he certainly used about this time.
The chief interest of this drawing to the artist himself afterwards lay in a
small oil copy which was painted in his presence in June 1852, by Mr. Reed,
an intimate friend learned in the history and mysteries of oil-painting, and
with whom it was my father's delight to discuss the practice of the great Vene
tians and other masters. In a note-book devoted to oil-painting my father
writes as follows : — " Mr. R. most kindly painted in one day before me an
" oil sketch from my ' Margate ' sunset — the mottled sky — to show me his
" method and processes, of which he had before, with the same kindness,
" imparted the general principles. His sketch seemed to me to possess some
" of the finest qualities of Venetian painting ; and some of those points on
" which, before, I had felt doubtful (particularly the cool reds and the
" heightenings with white, afterwards toned, during the progress of the work),
1 Like a good many works painted at this period it measures 28 x 2oi inches. I have
hitherto supposed the title to be A Landscape— sunset, but that work was exhibited in 1847.

SAMUEL PALMER. So
" I saw to be important points of a great scientific whole." My father after
wards writes at the beginning of his notes, " Inferences from the following
" combined with my own notion. A brilliant white ground, hirst painting,
" white, black, and grey. A little copal and spike oil, with very stiff white,
' painted freely and boldly with hog-tools, so as to get a permanent thread
" and texture, from which the successive paintings should become less and
" less impasted, filling up to a rich, solid, waxy, surface (in appearance).
" Second painting by various means got up to the intended colouring as
" soon as possible, only cooler than intended, and the blues and greys
" kept very fresh."
This note-book forms conclusive evidence that as late as 1852 my father
still clung to his old hope of practising, at all events occasionally, as an oil-
painter ; and there is an allusion to the beginning of a picture he had also
exhibited as a water-colour in 1 849, Farewell to Calypso. Indeed my late
researches among the lumber of our old home at Red Hill revealed enough
canvases, stretchers, panels, and even pictures in various stages of complete
ness, to convince any one of my father's devotion to a branch of art which
the disappointments of his later life left him so little opportunity of
practising. Christian descending into the Valley of Humiliation, a drawing of some
size exhibited in 1848, did not repay an unusually ambitious treatment.
In colouring it ranks with the works which constitute what I have called
the " transition stage " in my father's art, but the sky shows great knowledge.
It returned unsold from the exhibition to take its place with those unfor
tunates a few of which many a discouraged artist hides away from his own
and other people's sight.
For the summer months of 1849, my father took his family to Red Hill
in Surrey ; then a quiet and pretty neighbourhood whither, not many years
before, the Porchester Terrace veteran had removed. Here Mr. Linnell
now ruled his small dominion of " Redstone Wood " as independently as
an eastern chief. Designing his own house, and personally supervising the
fitting of almost every block of stone in its strong walls, he had so placed it
on the brow of a well-timbered hill sloping towards the west that it served
as his observatory for those effects for which he was soon to become cele
brated. He had, as it were, fortified a stronghold in the midst of the
placid and conventional country society, and there revelled in his art, pored
over Greek and Hebrew, ground his corn, baked his bread, brewed his ale,
and thundered forth his denunciations of men and opinions that displeased
him ; being aided and abetted in all that he did by a family to whom, for
the most part, every word of his was an irresistible ukase.
Religious differences had long since diminished what sympathy had
once existed between his son-in-law and himself ; and although the younger

90 THE LLFE OF
artist's respect for the veteran's genius, earnestness, and other sterling
qualities had decreased not one whit, there was an imperceptibly widening
breach between them. It could hardly have been otherwise when the one
had become an implacable enemy to sacerdotalism and the champion of
Liberalism in politics, while the other still firmly held to the religious faith
of his youth and had little sympathy with Radicals, although he no longer
railed at them with the intolerance found in The West Kent Address.
In his innumerable letters to my mother her father ceased not to argue
energetically and ingeniously on the side of nonconformity ; or to attack
with characteristic contempt and violence the faith she had embraced
before her marriage. It was these circumstances that led my father in one
of his letters to his wife, to speak as follows : — ¦
"... That we may never have in future to misspend time in the
' deplorable mischief of religious controversy, pray understand, as I
' thought I often mentioned, that I am no Puseyite, but a most unworthy
' member of the Church of Christ, in common with every one of those
' poor children at the Philanthropic Farm School ; that if I have any
' ' religious views ' — if I may use that disagreeable expression — they are
' about equally unfavourable to the Manning School and to Puritanism.
" I have no doubt that the worship of the primitive Christians was a
' musical service, and therefore always should prefer a chanted ritual to a
' read one ; but I should not frequent any church, nor have ever done so,
' where I thought that such ritual was accompanied by false doctrine,
' unless it were the only church within reach.
" I believe that our cathedral service is more like that of the Christian
' Church at Jerusalem under the episcopate of St. James, than any other
' I have ever heard of. As to worship in any societies not under the
' authority of our own bishops, or attendance at them, I can truly say that
' I have hitherto set an example of self-denial ; and [I] think in serious
' things of this kind it is always best to be on the safe side. Merely as
' an intellectual treat it would be a strong attraction to know that Dr.
' Newman is coming to London and will preach on the Sunday evenings,
' but I have hitherto forborne. ..."
This is the most distinct declaration of my father's religious opinions
with which I am acquainted ; and it was a subject upon which, in after life,
he was particularly reticent. The circumstances which led to the writing of
the foregoing words were not without their influence on his subsequent
history, and led to others which served to embitter the more effectually,
much of his future life.
It will be seen that, personally, he had little inducement to linger at
Red Hill, and he did no more than pay intermittent visits from London to
his family. He plied his brush and pencil on these occasions as

SAMUEL PALMER.

oi

assiduously as ever ; but a neighbourhood, however pretty, which was
almost entirely without running water and the rich pastoral sentiment he
loved — one daily suffering more and more from railway extension was not
much to his mind.
To this period, or perhaps to a time rather earlier, may be ascribed
some undated memoranda on a small sepia sketch : — " The principle of
"theBorghesi Titian, viz. ist, globose lights contrasted with. v/wA of dark,
" and 2nd, Added INTENSE spot of light and dark on figure ; as, for
" instance, black and white cow. Remember this, O thou dull brute ! "
Under a small sepia design of a Welsh castle and town, with the sun
setting behind them, are these words : — " Looking at a town in the late
" twilight the lightness and darkness of the local colours of the trees and
"buildings classify themselves and become breadths i. 2. 3.
" The gradations between them are a secondary matter, though
" exquisite, varying in size and brightness. Some of middle-tint. Some
" glittering through dark recesses or trees. The variety in candle-
" LIGHTS is most beautiful."
Beneath a sketch of the sun setting behind a near, dark, wooded hill
is the following. " Where the scheme is a great mass of dark under the
" sun, then cool local colours below are called for, as ruins or gray rocks.
" And I think the one vivid light on water from upper sky, as observed at
" Guildford among the deep middle-distant woods, very important where it
" can be introduced. I think so bright a light as the sun should be
" echoed somewhere ; and for a more important reason, it is wanted in
" orange twilight as otherwise there is no focus —the sky affording no
"point of focus when the sun is gone." Upon the same piece of paper,
but beneath a sketch of the sun setting behind a more distant down,
with an expanse of country between that down and the spectator is
written. " Middle distance not lighted by the sun has, after the manner of
" twilight after the sun dips, a delicate, warm light, from the golden
" horizon. Cover the sun, and you find it not confused but clear,
" though very broad and delicate, so that a little white might be used.
" Tempera would do it."
It is in his cash accounts for 1850 that I find my father's first
allusion to The Etching Club. This was a small society which flourished
most when the art of etching was comparatively little known in England,
and it was originally formed of a few more or less well-known Royal
Academicians and water-colour painters who were mutually acquainted,
and who supped every month in a jovial but simple fashion at each
other's homes. From time to time, exchanging the brush for the needle,
and beginning in 1841 with The Deserted Village, they had illustrated
some beautiful poem, or had brought out a portfolio of independent

92 THE LIFE OF
subjects. The slender profits accruing from these works were allotted by
ballot ; each member's vote, I believe, being distributed among his fellow
member's etchings in varying proportion according to his opinion of those
etchings. The result of this was that each plate was valued according to
its degree of merit and its degree of completeness, so that a slight sketch
upon the copper was valued at a lower sum than a ripe and highly-
finished etching.
Years afterwards, when a new art, resembling the old one chiefly in
name, became the rage there was a considerable infusion of new blood
into the Club ; and new opinions were introduced by the etchers who did
not carry their work as far as the older hands, upon the question of
the method of payment. Dissensions arose, and these disputes were the
beginning of the end. The Club lived long enough to be told by a new
school of critics which also had arisen that it had done very little for the
true art of etching — had been in the dark touching the resources, the
scope, and the legitimate field of that art. Then, after a futile struggle to
keep pace with the achievements of the " true etcher," as displayed in
the last work, the Club quietly ceased to exist.1
As my father belonged, and was proud to belong, to this little society,2
and firmly believed in the traditions which were current among some of
the older members, I will briefly describe the essential points of difference
between those traditions and the usage of the more modern school of
etchers, which has now, as it would seem, so completely eclipsed the old in
the esteem of the general public, and even in the esteem of some
connoisseurs. The etcher who believed in those old traditions approached his work
as a work of difficulty, uncertainty, but of supreme fascination. He
came fresh from his pictures or drawings — from a positive process and a
flexible point, to a negative process, where each line had to be scratched
with a small steel point upon a hard, shining metal, previously covered with
a kind of dark varnish ; and scratched too, the reverse way to that in which
it was finally to appear in the proof, all the lines of course being, in this stage,
of very nearly equal tenuity. As he hoped to achieve upon the copper some
of the highest, loveliest, and most subtle qualities in art ; to perpetuate and
1 It is some consolation to believers in the old tradition to find that, although
such of the early publications of the Club as find their way into the hands of the second
hand booksellers still fetch good prices, this last work fetches less than a quarter of the
price at which it was published ; even although every proof is signed by the artist.
2 He was also one of those vvho stoutly supported the old rules of the Club, and
failed to see why a plate which had taken him months to complete, upon which he had
lavished all his experience and knowledge, should be valued by fixed rule at the same
figure as a slight sketch done in a few hours, instead of having the value appraised by a
consensus of the members.

SAMUEL PALME P. ..;>
distribute a design that should be as good as he could make it, and do him
no dishonour, he was content to dwell day after day, and perhaps week after
week, upon the work ; till, to the uninitiated, the plate was a glittering chaos.
It was then immersed in an old-fashioned mordant or acid, which "bit in,"
or ate away to a certain degree, all the exposed lines, without touching the
surfaces of copper still protected by the varnish. Timing the first biting as
accurately as he could, the etcher removed the plate from the mordant, and
very carefully "stopped out" (that is, covered with varnish) such lines as
he intended to appear faintest in the proof. He then reimmersed the ulate
lor another carefully-timed period, and again " stopped out " ; repeating
these processes again and again,1 according as he desired more or less variety
of tone, gradation, and other high qualities, in the finished etching.
When all the lines except the deepest, or last bitten, had been covered with
stopping-out varnish, the etcher removed the ground and betook himself
(not without qualms) to his printer, who was to furnish him with the first
" trial proof." The printer of that day was an unambitious and often a very
unintelligent mechanic, firmly bound to the petrified traditions of an inflex
ible routine. He did no more, and was rarely asked to do more, than to
show the etcher the real extent and condition of his work ; which he accom
plished first by inking the plate all over, and then by wiping it with canvases
and polishing it with whiting till all the ink was removed, except that in the
excavations caused by the acid ; and the untouched surfaces between the
lines were consequently represented in the proof by absolutely clean paper.
The etcher, lacking the prescience and infallibility of the practised en
graver, was often humiliated, sometimes horrified to find that, in spite of all
his labours and all his calculations, he had fallen more or less short of his
intention — that his plate was empty, and lacked the variety, finish, and
gradation he had anticipated. He found perhaps, or was led to suppose by
unusually execrable printing, that he had miscalculated the activity of the
acid ; and that, consequently, certain passages had been over or under-
bitten. The printer, accustomed to the certainty of the professional, looked
upon this poor amateur with pity, and pulled him an extra proof or two,
each more or less identical with the first.
The artist then took up his work afresh. He laid a new ground, and
by means of patience, and care, and the higher branches of artistic know
ledge, achieved, little by little, the result he sought ; visiting the printer from
time to time, till he saw before him a proof which fulfilled his ideal — a
proof that, having been produced by fairly simple and straightforward
printing, could be repeated indefinitely.
The result achieved in this manner (presuming the etcher to be an cx-
1 A justly celebrated etcher is said to have given 70 distinct "stoppings out " to one
plate ; that is, to have created seventy varieties of depth.

94 THE LIFE OF
perienced artist) possessed certain qualities not to be found elsewhere within
the whole range of art. It was a happy mixture of " art and accident " ;
and the accident had been turned to such account by art that, in certain
respects, the result eclipsed the master-pieces of the most highly-skilled line
or mezzotint engravers. There was infinite variety of tone, with brilliant
sparkle and interplay of light and shade. The lights scintillated or gleamed ;
the shadows were at once transparent, shadowlike, and rich in colour ; the
half-tints were full of variety, together with subtle and charming gradation.
The workmanship itself varied from bold lines deeply excavated in the
metal, but still instinct with life, feeling, and draughtsmanship, to the most
tender and delicate manipulation that human fingers guided by human love
could compass. The etcher had concentrated all his enthusiasm and all his
knowledge upon these few superficial inches of steel or copper. He and
he alone was responsible for the exact degree of the mutual relations of
¦every tone, the shape and intensity of every light, and the perfect harmony
of the whole.
This was the tradition of the old-fashioned etchers as I have known
them ; and it is easy to pick out examples of its fulfilment from among
the earlier works of the Club.
It will be seen, of course, that one of the chief characteristics of this kind
of work was its honest and genuine originality. What it professed to be it
was. There was no more difficulty in distinguishing between the work of
the artist and the work of the copper-plate printer than there is in the case
of a proof of a line engraving. Nothing more was deputed to the printer
than he was, as a mechanic, fit to undertake, and no iota of the difficult
task of ripening the workmanship to the ideal perfection was eluded in
anticipation of help from other hands. Indeed, whether help were or were
not desired, it was not forthcoming.
With the usage of the modern etcher, the case, for the most part, is
different. Although he begins just in the same way, and with the same
materials ; and though, in some instances, he may even be equally careful
and solicitous in the choice of his subject, he soon reaches a point at which
his resemblance to his devoted elder brother ceases. He has learnt to
anticipate extraneous help, and this anticipation leads him to depute to
other hands some of the very matters which the old type of etcher would
have made an especial point of keeping in his own.
The nearer the simple old trade of copper-plate printing has approached
the borders of the occult sciences, and the more it has tempted the etcher by
offering him cheap substitutes for his own careful labour, the more has that
temptation been yielded to, till a point has been reached when it is not
unusual for an hour or even more to be spent by the printer upon a single
proof. This time is chiefly devoted to processes which were unknown to the

S A M UE I. PA L ME R. 95
old printer, and which more or less vitally effect the balance of the light and
shade, the shapes and intensity of the deepest shadows and highest
lights, the quality of the half-tones, and in some cases, even the drawing
of prominent objects. Inks of different colour are sometimes used for
different portions of the same subject, in order to convey a certain kind of
illusion, and even skies (not to mention sun, moon, and stars) have, after a
manner, been manufactured, where the etcher has preferred to save himself
the trouble.1It is true that, anticipating this assistance, the etcher may have planned
its direction and extent beforehand in his own mind, and that he may
endeavour by personally superintending the printing of a sample proof
and strictly enjoining the printer to imitate that proof to secure
the fulfilment of those plans throughout the edition. Were printers in
general possessed of any artistic education, or familiar with the rudi
ments of draughtsmanship, or of the laws of chiaroscuro and aerial per
spective, it is possible that such sanguine anticipations might be realized
to a certain extent, but only so far as it is possible for one artist to inter
pret the mind of another. For the most part, however, they are without
any such education, are petrified by their apprenticeship and early training,
and are nearly always working against time. It is therefore nearly as
preposterous to suppose that the printer can safely be trusted to materially
increase or diminish or to transpose the intensity of the lights and darks,
or otherwise to supplement or alter the etcher's workmanship time after
time through an edition, as to suppose that an artist's frame-maker could
be trusted to usurp the palette and brushes on "varnishing day," or his
colourman, to complete a black and white cartoon.
That the etcher's difficulties who trusts to his printer's skill so far from
being diminished by either printing himself, or getting some master of the
art to print him, a sample proof for an edition are often greatly increased
is a fact that has been abundantly proved. The greatest master-printer of
the age is well aware of this. A proof that he himself can produce in a
few minutes as he smokes his cigarette is often unapproachable by any less
skilful and supple-fingered person ; and he will decline to pull a sample
proof for an edition so good that he knows his staff will be incapable of
copying it successfully. A well-known publisher who had been continually
confronted with this difficulty of getting a sample proof successfully
imitated throughout an edition (or indeed imitated at all) told me that, in
his opinion, the difficulty arose from the fact that the average printer is
incapable of seeing the difference between an execrable proof and a superb
one — incapable of analyzing the causes of his success or failure. It is
1 That skies have proved a stumbling-block to many a member of the modern school
would seem probable, from the innumerable instances in which they are altogether omitted.

96 THE LIFE OF
obvious that if it is impossible to make the manipulator see why a wipe in
a certain place or direction makes the difference between a good proof
and a bad one — if the language in which you can best convey your mean
ing is unknown to him, you cannot expect that wipe to be given intelli
gently ; and you may cudgel your brains in vain for the mechanical
equivalents to such terms as "breadth," "delicate half-tone," "vivacity,"
"sparkle," "richness," or "gradation."
In this consists one of the chief stumbling-blocks of the modern etcher,
and it arises from his deserting, in certain all-important particulars, the
older traditions of the art. He has learnt to rely on help of a very
material kind (a kind that makes or mars his own work as an artist), from
a man who is not, and never can be an artist — a man who, by training and
necessity, must, does, and will, always work as a skilled mechanic. And
the evil does not end here ; for in many cases a sample proof is given to
this mechanic which has depended upon its success in the artist's eyes
upon certain qualities which no one who is not also an artist is capable of
understanding. These qualities the mechanic endeavours to imitate, and
in doing so he produces those remarkable results which have, of late years,
appeared by the dozen in print-sellers' shop windows, under the title (and
sometimes the fraudulent title) of " Artist's Proofs."
I have Mr. Hamerton's permission to quote one of the strongest
protests I have seen, against the printing of etchings by mere tradesmen.
Writing to my father in January, 1872, he says : — " What a murderous thing
bad printing is, for etchings ! A new edition of a book of mine with 37 of
my own little plates has just been published in America. The plates were
printed .... in London, and so ignorantly, stupidly, and hideously that
I was quite unable to bear the sight of the book and stuck it into the fire
where I would stick every other copy of the same edition if I could only
get at them all. I will never trust an etching again in the hands of any
tradesman printer. To print an etching a man ought to be an artist."
The tricks and dodges of printing are very fascinating and very beautiful
in themselves, but the etcher of the older school who tried such few dodges
as existed in his day found sooner or later that, in trusting them too impli
citly, he was leaning on a broken reed. Taken broadly, and compared for
the sake of illustration with the best earlier etchings of the old Club, many
modern plates are monotonous in tone, and lacking in brilliancy. Their
chief faults appear to be a flatness and lack of variety which is mainly
brought about by what is technically called the retroussage of the darks
and shadows ; this, besides making them all of equal depth, makes them
all of the same quality. The modern printer rarely achieves a skilful focus
either in his lights or darks, and if he does achieve a focus it is very often
in the wrong place. Such partnership productions do not show the true

SA M UE I. PA L ME R. 97
genius of an exquisite and essentially autographic art ; and although they
may be, as their admirers assert, " true etchings," or " done at a sitting," or
done with " a few lines sternly clear," they kick the beam as works of art
and of love, when fairly weighed by impartial and competent judges
against such plates as Mr. Hook's x Egg Gatherers, his Fisherman's Good
night, or the late Frederick Taylor's inimitable little plate entitled What
shall he have who killed the Deer )
To such a pitch has the confusion between the work of the etcher and the
work of the printer risen, that criticisms have been written, and written too
with all the authority of the specialist, in which the former has been credited
with effects due entirely to the latter. In the eyes of such of the public as
are learned enough to know that " etching " is not drawing in pen and ink,
the confusion is still more completely confounded : but the admirer of one
of the old etchings (" false " I suppose we must call them, if we wish to be
up to date), had at least the consolation of knowing whose handiwork it was
which he admired. This is a consolation which is denied to the purchaser,
and denied, it seems, even to the critic of to-day.
The etcher of the older school was by no means without the vexation of
spirit arising from his printer's inflexible adhesion to ancient tradition, but
his work gained rather than lost by those eternal laws which govern the
British workman, because he was led to a distrust of mere machinery, human
or otherwise — led to that patient, thoughtful, and devoted ripening, to that
solicitude of mind, upon which all high excellence depends, in picture or in
poem. The printing of that day could be done badly — even brutally ; and in
common with his brother members of the Club my father suffered much from
work which was not only unintelligent, but which seemed almost vindictive.
Indeed it sometimes approached that " thorough scouring with a cloth " men
tioned, I believe, as the usual method of wiping etchings by a critic in The
Pall Mall Gazette. Over and over again my father had striven for ink which
was not cold but warm in tone, and he had always been defeated by the
surreptitious mixture of a little blue with tlie black. He had stood on the
watch, hour after hour, to prevent the inevitable and equal " scouring" of the
surface of the plate with whiting before passing it through the press. He
had mourned over cheerless tints of India and other papers, and had covered
the margins of many a proof (now in my keeping), with pathetic adjurations
that might just as well have been addressed to the press as to the man who
1 Of modern etching Mr. Hook writes to my father thus :— " Some etchers, nowadays,
"dip a daddy long-legs into the ink, and start him on an adventure across a continent of
"papier verge: A glowing eulogy appears in The Times. 1st state proofs, before
"daddy fluttered his wings, 5 guineas! After flutter 8 guineas!! ! and so on. Poor
" Rembrandt ! " H

98 THE LIFE OF
turned the wheel. He knew nothing then (and the printers of that day
knew as little) of the possibilities latent in the grimy and relentless
paraphernalia of the printing-office. But time passed on, etching became
popular, and at last, under the auspices of the best printer of the day, my
father introduced a press into his own house, where blueing, and " scour
ing," and inflexible routine, no longer tormented him.
With his liking for ideals, he had always aimed at ideal printing, but even
when all the resources of the art were at his command he did not abate one
jot of the time, and care, and patience he bestowed upon his plates. I will
quote a paragragh of a letter I received from him when I was very carefully
printing a series of remarque proofs of one of his plates, at my own press in
London : — " Success in the printing of this etching depends on delight
" in solitude and locked doors, a contemplative mood, and intense con-
" centration ; indeed, these are the conditions of all high excellence. . . .
" I say again, consider of your kind of printing (as Sir Joshua says to
" the painter), that you must work with THE BALANCES IN YOUR
" HAND ; that whosoever balances must attend — whosoever attends
" must, during that mental operation, ' be quiet.' " In another letter
he writes thus : — " For myself, I doubt whether etching, in the old
" sense of the word, is not almost superseded by the new art of
" retroussage, added by the printer upon a comparatively slight fabric.
" Sometimes it has been very effective, but in most instances is so
" inferior to linear etching as to become quite another art : but then,
"as it produces an effect quite as satisfactory to the public in about one-
" fifth of the time,1 it beats linear etching out of the market. It seems to
" me that the charm of linear etching is the glimmering through of the
" white paper even in the shadows, so that almost everything either
" sparkles or suggests sparkle. Now this is somewhat like the effect of a
" purely white ground under an oil painting. The demonstrable differ-
" ence may be small, but the real deterioration of a dark ground is
" universal ; and, not to quote irreverently, it is a ' darkness that may
" be felt ' if it cannot be proved. Well retroussage, if not kept within
" narrow bounds, extinguishes the thousand little luminous eyes which
" peer through a finished linear etching, and in those of Claude are
" moving sunshine upon dew, or dew upon violets in the shade."
In the slight biographical sketch I published in 1882 I spoke of my
father's practice in the technicalities of etching as combining " successful
calculation," and "deep knowledge of the materials employed," with
" inexhaustible patience," and " marvellous manipulative skill." This, I
1 Here my father is in error. The darks produced by retroussage can be achieved in
very much less than a fifth of the time they would take if produced by the action of the
acid.

SA .1/ UE I. PA I. ME R. 99
regret to say, is not accurate. He himself speaks of his earlier practice as
" a scramble of uncertainties from beginning to end ; " and when I recall
all that I have seen him do, and all the notes he made upon the subject, I
must admit that although we may freely grant him his patience and
manipulative skill these were more often displayed in overcoming the
results of inexperience and mischance than in aiding those of "successful
calculation." His greatest skill lay in the matchless art with which he not
only turned accident, and often very untoward accident, to account, but
produced from it latent qualities which far eclipsed any qualities that
would have arisen from greater precision and certainty. For example ;
he writes : — " . . I used to sit down to etching with becoming gravity,
" though the work had sometimes a rather negative bearing ; for I re-
" member once spending a whole day in nearly burnishing out a sky that
"was overbitten. The perverse acid would bite skies and nothing else ;
" but being spared to attempt another, I humbly trust to go half through
" the copper." This plate was The Skylark, and what I so much admire
in it — the delicate upward flush of early dawn over thin vaporous cloud,
was the result of the day's elbow-grease directed, not by knowledge of any
¦etching technicality, but by knowledge of one of the most beautiful effects
in nature. To quote him again on this question of uncertainty, he says : — " ... I
" spent several days w-orking and proving in London in a ghastly frame of
" mind, owing, for once, not to my own clumsiness, but to the detestability,
" both as to thinness and quality, of the old, scraped, Club copper on which
" [my etching] was done. I gave myself up for lost on Saturday at 5.30,
" but, by a desperate perseverance, had singed the last neck of the hydra
" by 6.15, and hope to send you soon, one of the very best impressions.
"... My wretched plate bent up like an earwig disturbed in an egg-
" plum." I think it is natural to wonder a little, first at the notable
economy which served out to a member of the Club a plate thinned down
by the removal of a former etching, and secondly at the innocence of
technicalities which cheerfully accepted that plate and produced upon it
so elaborate an effort as The Morning of Life in happy ignorance that,
in the hands of a printer vvho seems to have been equally innocent of
technical knowledge, it would curl up " like an earwig disturbed in an
egg-plum." The Willow, my father's probationary etching, was not at all ambitious. It
was the first essay and an honest one, in an art which was once considered
difficult. It will be seen that some of the lines in the sky have been
ruled, a fault that led to a timely admonition from that superb etcher Mr.
Creswick, and to my father's study of the sky of that tiny masterpiece
Evening on the Common. The great technical advance from The Willow

ioo THE LIFE OF
to the three little plates known as The Herdsman's Cottage, Christmas, and
The Skylark, is in some degree accounted for by the help and encourage
ment received from my father's old friend the late Mr. C. W. Cope, and
from that eminently kind and skilful artist, the late Mr. T. O. Barlow.
The Skylark reproduces the theme though not the details of the small
picture I have mentioned as having been painted con amore some years
before. My father was not content with transcribing on copper (as he did in the
case of The Willow) some sketch or study, but having thought out and
matured a congenial subject in his mind, he seemed to plunge at once
and by preference into a combat with the greatest possible difficulties.
Among those he successfully overcame (besides the effect I have mentioned
in The Skylark), are the contrast of the cold sheen of the moon with the
cosy glimmer of candle and firelight ; and the full blaze and dazzle of the
sun, setting behind trees which cast a dancing maze of shadows on the
grass. Such effects are hard enough to deal with by means of all the
resources of pencil and colours, but when they are attained by processes
such as directing the attacks of a powerful corrosive upon steel or copper
we may permit ourselves to admire.
My father's sheet anchor was that beautiful refinement known as
" stopping out." This is a process so vitally important that it was shrewdly
said by a well-known engraver that one day devoted to it was worth five
devoted to the needle. It will be seen by an examination of such plates
as The Herdsman and The Rising Moon, what an amount of thoughtful
work was bestowed upon them in this respect.
A pithy saying of Mr. Hook's concerning etching, " Lose your line
and you lose your light," my father kept constantly in mind. Retroussage,
unless very sparingly and skilfully applied to his plates by an artist's hand,
would destroy that clearness of line, and with it half their subtlety, their
atmosphere, transparency of shadow, and variety of tone.
Those who have seen him sitting, sable in hand, hour after hour behind
the tissue paper, pencilling in varnish silver cloudlets round a moon ; or
have seen him revelling in the ferocity of the seething mordant with which
he sometimes loved to excavate an emphatic passage will not wonder that
he achieved only thirteen etchings ; and they will think, perhaps, that the
measure of his celebrity, in this his favourite branch of art, is well
deserved. Of these thirteen plates, eight were finished at Kensington, but both
The Morning of Life and The Early Ploughman, though begun there, were
finished elsewhere.
Having lived three years in the old cottage in Victoria Road, early in
1 85 1 my father moved into Douro Place, a neighbouring street. Number

SAMUEL PALMER. mi
six was about the most complete antithesis to his ideal of a residence that
could have been devised. It was a hideous little semi-detached house,
with a prim little garden at the back and front, and an ample opportunity
of profiting by the next door neighbours' musical proclivities. One end of
Douro Place was occasionally honoured by royalty, and by the other lesser
luminaries vvho visited the well-known sculptor John Hell : and the other
end was blocked by a high wall. By all the sights and cries peculiar to a
surburban cul-de-sac Douro Place was favoured, and many an organ-
player well used to sudden ejectment from other lairs of artists played
with impunity near Number six, little thinking what happy memories of the
sunny South his dark visage was calling up.
There was no studio, so my father painted, as best he might, in the
" drawing-room," purposely chosen by him for certain reasons on account
of its direct south light, in spite of the out-look upon the opposite houses.
Perhaps the chief of these reasons was the saddening influence upon
an artist's colouring of a North light — an influence which (especially in
London) my father thought had been very detrimental, chiefly to figure-
painters. The rent being higher than that of the old cottage his fight became
still harder, and do what he would to economize his expenses steadily
increased. His patience, however, kept pace with his vexations. Years
ago, when half a dozen pictures out of eight sent to the Academy were
rejected, he had resolved "with the patience of an ox " to paint an equal
number for rejection the following year and, " if need be, the year after
that." Now, when his son was rapidly growing towards boyhood, and the
temptation to abandon his unprofitable ideal and to court popularity was
redoubled, he quietly and firmly put it away from him. He sought to
become, as he put it, "a Christian bull-dog;" and every day brought
abundant opportunities of emulating the virtues peculiar to that tenacious
quadruped. The following passage is significant, and although it was written later in
his life it describes his present convictions :— " Many very striking qualities
" may be rapidly secured, but those which touch the feelings and the imagina-
" tion cannot be tossed off; so that when there is, as at present, a ready
" art market at high prices, no artist can do full justice to himself but by
" foregoing thousands of pounds which are within his reach." This frame
of mind was not new, for twenty years before, Mr. Linnell had vainly pointed
out a quick and easy way to independence. Nor was the renunciation of
popular art an example of what is known as "sour grapes." A glance at
almost any of the best Italian, Welsh, or south-of-England studies leads to
the conclusion that had the artist vvho could produce such works, and
produce them so easily, chosen to watch the weather-cock for every flaw and

102 THE LIFE OF
shift in the fickle breeze of public taste — if he had chosen to tint and
stipple up the traditional drawing-room water-colour he might by this time
have steered into a snug harbour. Although he was failing to realize his
inmost ideal it existed still, and it saved him from that sordid and miser
able bondage to ways and means in which so many toil the best of their
lives away — it saved him from the blight of mediocrity.
A phenomenally bad man of business he still not only put a very low
price upon his very best work, but often failed to get even that ; and he
was indifferent to the time he bestowed in ripening a drawing, even after it
had been exhibited, bought, and paid for. There were thus several causes,
besides his unwavering allegiance to poetic landscape, tending to decrease
his income, and had it not been for his teaching he must either have for
saken his ideal altogether, or come to a dead-lock in his affairs. His
exceedingly simple personal habits and rigid economy removed some of the
usual temptations to extravagance, but it may be imagined that a man with
so devoted a love of books and fine old prints must have had, from time to
time, many a burning shilling in his pocket. The paraphernalia of the little
room which did duty for a studio were eloquently simple. Such matters
as frames the worse for wear, a common student's easel, plethoric, home
made portfolios, or a kitchen chair half hidden beneath a pile of unmounted
sketches are not lost upon the astute dealer, accustomed to the sumptuous
luxury in the studios of the popular R.A.'s., and he deals accordingly.
Unless with the boldest men nothing succeeds like success, because of
success is born that confidence and health that carries the diffident and
painstaking man through difficulty ; but, on the other hand, no heart sinks
so low as the heart of an enthusiast who does his best to produce refined
and excellent work, regardless of time and of labour, when he finds its very
refinement its chief drawback and its price gauged chiefly by his own
necessity. Driven by necessity as he was on the one hand, and tempted by the
certainty of making money on the other, it is wonderful that my father's
loyalty to his old choice of subject remained unshaken, but the titles of
many drawings he exhibited after he became an Associate of the Old
Society proclaim that loyalty. Nevertheless, the colour of some of the
works of this time leads to a suspicion that the untoward external circum
stances were not without an influence ; and it is easy to see that the Princes
Risborough resolutions as applied to strong colour are in force, though
the " plates and bassi-relievi of wrought gold " are not to be found.
The following notes in a design-book are of import. They speak of
seeking a " new style," involving less manipulative finish ; and also, for the
first time, of lowering his themes : —
"Never hurry for exhibitions, but from the Autumn of 1850, D.V.,

SAMUEL PALMER.

¦°3

" carry on a continuous movement of works for sale. Endeavour after oil
" pictures. What are the secrets of a proper rapidity, ist ? Decision in the
" first design — seeing the whole at once. Trying after indicative formation
" of the central difficulty. After a studious and careful preparation, instead
" of aiming at finish aim to execute the mental vision with as little
" manipulation and as much inventive energy as possible ; doing only what I
" see .... A more large and general system of study from nature ; less
" task-work and fatigue. Investigation of effects, WAITING till they present
" themselves ; then trying to catch them thus : —
" ist. (A) A very small sketch of the Proportion of Darks in pencils or
" chalks : (B) A small coloured sketch of the same, merely for use, but the
" more complete the better as a specimen of the class of effect. Have an
" eye to the above this year, D.V., but let the ETCHING be the point of
" most painstaking.
" 2nd. Sunsets or the like on some bold principle, or one sunset and one
" moon and firelight of the same story. Look carefully over Devon and
" Cornwall sketches for smaller subjects.
" A deep, Gray Day a good subject. Coincident with other things will
" be an attempt at a New Style.
" Forswear HOLLOW compositions like Calypso and St. Paul, and
" forswear great spaces of sky. TAKE SHELTER in TREES and try
" the always pleasing arrangement of white cloud behind ramification, and
' reflex in water ; also sheep foregrounds.
" Even Mr.  finds that the directly poetical subjects are less
" saleable ; so if I go upon this tack and lower the themes I must
" endeavour to compensate for contraction of span by intensity of expres-
" sion and development.
" I am inclined to think that a sketch in one colour, with all the principal
" parts and striking completed effect, would be a very sure foundation, and
" the painting from it comparatively easy. Try something like the solid
" BLOCKS of sober colour in De Wint.
"Why do I wish for a NEW STYLE? ist. To save time. 2nd. To
" govern all by broad, powerful chiaroscuro. 3rd. To ABOLISH all
" NIGGLE. The MEANS, ist. To work from a bold sepia sketch carried
" on so far that figure and everything should be already decided. 2nd. Not
" to be solicitous about the brightness of little specks of light, so as to
" hinder the full sweep of a great brush by which should be attained the
" full and right effect at a distance.
" My chance of standing with others in execution will be to find my
" way to it by certainty of effect and parts in first design. 2ndly. By not
" in any way evading FORM. 3rdly. By painting with large and
" broad gradation (v : Gaspar Poussin), suggesting minutiae by large

104

THE LIFE OF

"work. NEVER FORGET TINTORET'S scheme of CAST
SHADOW.
" Try to have in progress a number of small subjects in which extreme
" fewness shall be the charm — for I fear that I have neither power nor
" inclination to do anything which is not in some way or other strongly
" characterized. . . . Subjects to have ACTION.
" Action. HUNTING. DRIVING of SHEEP, Parting the flocks.
" STORM in HARVEST. FORDING THE BROOK. Steadying the
" cart. The fall of the Oak— felling.
"THE PRACTICAL SUGGESTION of 1850 is to open, D.V.,
" some connections for PRIVATE SALE ; and 2nd, to collect and keep by
" themselves all [the works] that I have for sale."
It is noteworthy that after a four years' interval the writer of these notes
once more cautions himself against too great a solicitude about the " little
specks of light." For these he had a weakness, and he knew their priceless
value in what he was accustomed to call true etching. His later method of
using some pigments much drier than is usual in water-colour, and of
dragging one colour dryly over another led to a sparkle and brilliancy which
was largely due to the little specks he refers to. Such characteristic
qualities were conspicuously absent in certain drawings which I believe to
have been the outcome of this hankering after a method whose primary
object was (as he honestly admits) to save time.
After reading the foregoing notes there is a feeling that it would be
more desirable to possess a work executed before they were put in force,
than afterwards. However charming " extreme fewness " might be made,
or however desirable it might be to economize time, it was not such things
as these which increased my father's reputation ; and it was fortunate for
that reputation that it was neither within his power nor inclination to do
many works at all events latterly, which were not characterized by fullness
and above all by ripeness.
As it was to teaching drawing that my father at this time of his life owed
the possibility of painting his favourite themes at all, it might be supposed
that there, at all events, he courted popularity and economized his time by
the most approved means. He knew perfectly well what such means were.
He knew precisely what degree and kind of efficiency rich parents expected
the drawing-master to impart, and he knew precisely how some of the most
fashionable masters had become so.
He wrote in the latter years of his life : — " What inspired young ladies
"think they may accomplish after a course of lessons is what can barely be
" approached by a life-long study." And again : — " In nine cases out of
" ten people don't want real teaching for their daughters, but some fine
" touched-up drawings to show in which they do not reflect themselves but

SAMUEL PALMER. mS
" their masters. I have no reason to complain, having always in London
" as much teaching as I could desire, but it is my full conviction that a good
" bold quack, with plenty of tact, a comely presence, and well cut, Moby boots
" would beat any real artist out of the field as a teacher— I mean as to the
" figure he would cut on Schedule IV He also complains that the higher
the rank of his employers the more surely he found the domestic school
room resembling, as far as art was concerned, " the operating-room ol a
third-class hair-dresser's shop : "' and this leads him to wonder, (as I have
mentioned before) whether sight is considered " the lowest of the senses,
that education does not deign to recognize it."1
Now, in spite of the enormous temptation to follow the usual fashion of
teaching he took as his watch words two of the very last things which are
palatable to most of an artist's private pupils, namely "Elements and
Accuracy." As in his own artistic practice he worked on sound principles,
these he taught, and in these he remained unshaken. He writes thus to a
young lady who was a favourite pupil and friend : — " My plan with you
" and Laura has been from the very first to have you make really good
" drawings, instead of a parcel of half-studied fragments ; but if you
" wish for any great success, repeat to each other when you meet in the
" morning the word EXACTNESS. All who draw from nature must be
" exact. Talent is shown by rapid exactness. Genius is developed
" through slow exactness at first ; but whether fast or slow it is exact,
" and is called genius when it most exactly embodies sublime conceptions.
" All educational acquisitions which have not exactness are in my
" opinion worse than useless ; so much injury is done to the mental
" structure by the bad habits acquired in the obtaining of these so-called
" acquirements. I would rather see young people play at marbles, for
" then they do manage to be as exact as they can ; and so far, it is a true
" educational exercise.
" I believe you will be exact ; and let me tell you it is a very rare gift
" indeed." With a reckless disregard of the financial consequences he guarded
his pupils against too sudden a conceit of proficiency because they might
be able to make a tolerable copy of fruit, or flowers, or a rustic cottage by
setting them to draw an egg in black and white chalk ; an undertaking
1 Few professional men can at the same time be more amused and more galled by the
public ignorance of their craft than artists. Every one whose daughters can daub a
cottage or a bird's nest assumes a half-contemptuous equality of knowledge with the
man who has spent the best years of his life in mastering a few of the problems of art.
Both the ignorance and the assurance reach a climax in certain country society, as can be
readily seen on such occasions as church decoration, the distribution of awards for table
decoration at flower-shows ; and last but not least, in that crucial test of taste, the
modern " drawing-room."

106 THE LIFE OF
which the beginner will find rather humiliating. Indeed, he himself
would sometimes "go to school to a potato," as he expressed it; because
the making a good and unmistakable chalk likeness of such an object
severely taxes the draughtsman's power, and tends very much to his
advantage. Much to the astonishment of his neighbours my father often allowed
the weeds and grass of the little back garden to reach maturity, in order
that his pupils might draw them from the window ; and the laurel-bushes
did duty in the same manner. Underneath a chalk sketch of his own of
some dandelions and grass-tufts on the back lawn are these words : —
" Farewell, soft clusters — the only pretty things about the premises — ye
" are to be mowed this evening, and to leave a scraped scalp of
"'RESPECTABILITY!' May, 1856."
For the sake of dear old Kent he had planted a root of hops among
the lilac bushes, and in one of his letters he laments that, just as its
clusters were fit for sketching they had been ravished by the baker !
Between 1.848 and 1858, my father visited Devon and Cornwall four
times, on each succeeding occasion becoming more enthusiastic in his
admiration. His luggage and paraphernalia were simpler than ever, and
after describing a beautiful South Devon route he says : — " This would
"be a thing to do very leisurely ; no luggage, but one spare shirt.
" Sketching portfolio with thin plate-paper, and Richard and Wilson's
" thin brown paper, which would weigh lightly. In pocket, case of
" pencils and black and white chalk, and light little box for reserve black
" and white chalk, and the three chromes,1 and blue and browns for slight
" indications of local colour on the brown paper. This, on the whole,
" I find the most rapid method of sketching." He says elsewhere "If
" I am spared to go again into the country I hope to begin a new plan
" —not sitting down to local matter, but WALKING and WATCHING.
" I ought to see Chiddingstone three miles from Hever, or some very
" picturesque village, for lines about mills, old forges, or cottage doors,
" as these things are so useful where husbandry figures are introduced. I
" ought to watch the operations of husbandry. The MONTHS would
" make a good book of etchings."
He also writes thus about the same time : — " ... I coasted round as
" far as Ilfracombe — waterfall into the sea — then back, and landed at
" Combe Martin, walking home to Berrynarbor. We must take the
" trouble to map out and paint with the different local colours arable land
" and garden, which come in every variety of rows and patterns. Also
1 As in the case of Indian yellow, he appears to have been unaware of the unreliable
nature of the chromes. He afterwards rejected all these pigments from his list of " safe
colours."

>c ifj.^i?

Mouth Mill, near Clovelly.

~—'r.-.*~-^**.y : -.'.

V ww>i ,v**»«"

Clovelly Park.

.V A M UE I PA I. ME R. 107
•• woods and woody hills must be juicy and rich ; real TREK ( '( (LOUR,
" not anything picture colour. Detached, elegant trees sometimes stand
" out into the glade [sketch] ; and above the woody or arable hill-tops, a bit
" of much higher hill is sometimes visible, [all] heaving and gently lifting
" themselves, as it were, towards the heavens and the sun. It is of no use
" to try woody hills without a wonderful variety of texture based on the
" modelling. " In the solemn moor-tops, the furze \:c. is the dark, and the barer
" ground a graduating half-tint — but all dark and solemn. WHAT CAN
" BE THE REASON that they delight so much ?
" NEVER FORGET THE CHARM of running water. In Berry-
" narbor valleys it gushes everywhere. O ! the playful heave and tumble
" of lines in the hills here."
Another time he writes to a friend : — " We had a glimpse of South
" Devon — loveliest of lands ! And, but for the rain, we should have tracked
" its infinite richness till it becomes the enamelled footstool of Dartmoor.
" May the utterly South-Devon stricken-one who is now solacing his South
" Kensington exile with your Murray keep it a little longer, till he has
" time to get another and an ordnance map of that sweet place ? No
" wonder that Reynolds painted richly (we visited his birthplace), or that
" Johnson, in that lap of nature's luxury, forgot himself over the Devon-
" shire cream."
In nearly all his sketching my father aimed first at a careful selection
of subject matter which would add to his knowledge or supply a record of
some valuable phenomenon ; next, at rapidity of execution ; and he pre
ferred amassing a store of knowledge by a kind of shorthand which was
intelligible only to himself to wasting time on work more elaborate and
intelligible to other people. As I shall have occasion to reiterate, every
thing done thus was not an end in itself, but the means to an end.
His repeated allusions to the importance of these annual campaigns
(holidays in no sense), his anxiety to get away in time for his favourite
effects, and his reluctance to attempt to paint the most difficult of
these effects merely from memory show that, even by an avowedly
imaginative painter, a direct and constant reference to nature or rather
an intense, absorbing, and lifelong study of nature was considered
absolutely essential. This is to be found in the Princes Risborough
notes, and over and over again elsewhere. He was aware that the deep
study of nature has given to many an immortal work of art and literature
at once its truth, its grandeur, and its wonderful perennial freshness ; but
he was also aware that those who see in a superb sunset little more than
an interesting chromatic phenomenon, and in the richest nooks of wild
country merely so much material for the landscape-gardener and farmer

108 THE LIFE OF
of the future do not study nature to the greatest advantage. He knew
that the " naturalistic school " of painters, as he called them, became
popular chiefly because, in their appeals to those whose sense of sight
{mental and physical) had not been cultured, they made themselves easily
^ understood. Painting (and often painting very admirably) objects that
are universally familiar, they produce a picture in which nothing startles,
or perplexes, or offends. But the poor, shrivelled, half-starved faculties,
that the imaginative artist seeks to reach and to awaken remain untouched.
Although my father was beginning to see more clearly than ever that
the country was the most profitable home for a landscape-painter such as
himself, there was a certain part of his London life which he enjoyed very
keenly In one of the early note-books dealing with that most peculiar
form of male domestic despotism which he called " Household Govern
ment " he lays down the law that the hours of evening must be held
absolutely " sacred " to literature and music ; but though he still revelled
in this kind of quiet, cosy seclusion, he was often tempted abroad, even in
those sacred hours, by the attraction of thoroughly congenial society.
A real anxiety to improve himself was one of his most distinguishing
characteristics, and he was habitually watchful to learn something from all
with whom he was brought into contact. Self-assertion and the exposition
of personal opinion not being rare, he had innumerable opportunities of
gathering his mental honey. How he revolted at a very pommon opposite
tendency to gather evil rather than good, and against the treachery that
abuses kindness and hospitality by making it an opportunity for the storage
of scandal and ridicule is shown in one of his letters to his elder son.
By this time, and notwithstanding that his anxieties had been increased
by my own birth, the chief interest and solicitude of his life had centred in
that elder son. The provision of the means for his education was his
chief inducement to work, and to watch his mental growth his chief
pleasure. For all grief and labour, past, present, and to come there
might be one rich reward — to see this son grow up a good, learned,
Christian gentleman.
Few have been better fitted than my father to prepare the ground for
such a harvest. There was no looseness of purpose, no indecision, no
doubt as to the essential points. There was one guiding principle, and a
bright pharos to steer by. " Let me advise you," he wrote to my brother,
" amidst all you meet with, gay or grave, pleasant or irksome to remember
" that there is also RIGHT and WRONG— never to forget that."
The boy promised well. Inheriting not only his father's precocity, but
the musical tastes which had accompanied it, he worked hard and did well
at school. Each successful achievement, and each addition to the row of
prizes on the shelves at home warmed his father's heart, and fanned the

SAMUEL PALMER.

lui.

flame of his one great ambition. Like the father and son in the old days
at Surrey Square and Bloomsbury, these also were much together, talking
as they walked of their pleasant labours in the mines of poetry and
philosophy, and of the associations abounding in the old London streets.
On Sundays they often attended the services at St. Paul's and
Westminster Abbey, glorying in the music, and gazing their fill on the tombs
of the heroes and poets whom they seemed to know so intimately through
their works. Whatever my father clearly loved seemed to find a natural
place in his son's heart, and there was no thought of the dangers of precocity
stimulated by over culture.
In June 1854, my father was elected a full Member of the Society of
Painters in Water Colours, having contributed to the Exhibition in Pall
Mall in the eleven years of his Associateship seventy works. In the first/
three years he had sent a large proportion of Italian subjects, but the
themes of nearly the whole of the drawings that followed appear to have
been derived from British Pastoral scenery.
It has been gathered that, at one time, it seemed as if he curbed his
natural impulse in the direction of strong colour and daring composition
from prudential motives ; and he speaks of " designs prudentially con
sidered." But, from time to time, he allowed himself more freedom. As
regards composition, this was the case in The Dell of Comus (1855), a
notable and very original drawing, full of wild poetry. The theme was
evidently congenial, and the whole mind was thrown into the execution.
The Brothers in Comus lingering under the Vine (1856) is a work which
shows more characteristic colouring and an arrangement much favoured by
the painter, in which the direct rays of the sun are partly veiled by thin,
intricate foliage. This drawing, and its companion, The Brothers discover
ing the Palace and Bowers of Comus which was exhibited at the same time
were very well received by my father's fellow artists ; but, in spite of a
moderate price, returned unsold from the exhibition — another significant
hint that he dolorously took to heart. These two subjects are in the
matter of colour so totally dissimilar, that they suggest an attempt to
gauge the public taste by offering an alternative. The Brothers under the
Vine is as rich and vivid as the other is what admirers of my father's
most characteristic work might probably call vapid.
In 1855 Mr. Alexander Gilchrist introduced himself, full to overflowing
of interest in Blake ; and he must have been somewhat astonished to find
in his new acquaintance an enthusiasm equal to his own, and no whit the
fainter for long lapse of years. My father and mother spent several
memorable evenings deep in the rich collection of well-remembered works
which the biographer was busy in describing ; and once they became so
absorbed that day broke when they thought the evening scarcely ended.

no THE LIFE OF
In the following year my father again undertook some drawing upoi
wood, namely nine illustrations to the story of " The Distant Hills " in ;
new edition of Adams's Sacred Allegories. Three other designs had appearet
in A Poetry Book for Children two years before, and two more are to bi
found in The Book of favourite Ballads published some time afterwards
This appears to have been the last of his work on wood, and the resul
cannot be regarded as satisfactory. He seems to have been unaware thai
any special treatment was necessary to secure a good translation by the
engraver, and to have worked on the block just as he would have worked
on a pencil drawing not intended to be reproduced at all. As he expected
impossibilities in translation and was inexperienced in this kind of drawing.
it is no wonder that the outcome was disappointing to himself and to
others. Had he persevered in some early attempts to cut a block or two
with his own hands the result would no doubt have been notable in some
way or other ; for in wood-cutting, as in everything else, he had a high ideal.
His ideal will be found embodied in Blake's own blocks for Thornton's
edition of Phillips's Pastorals. These, in my father's opinion, were " perhaps
the most intense gems of bucolic sentiment in the whole range of art," and
" utterly unique." He spoke of them as his " heart's delight," and con
tended that, unlike the skilful modern wood engravings, they showed the
true genius of the art — those essential qualities which should distinguish
it from other arts. One of the chief treasures of his " Curiosity Portfolio HI
was a sheet or two of early proofs from these little blocks, printed and
signed by Blake in his presence.
Turning to my father's technical water-colour practice about this time,
we find that fortunately it can be described pretty much in his own words,
by means of his letters and his common-place book.
In 1830 he had written : — " Let not the painter say ' I have done many
" pictures, and therefore should be able to do this less carefully ; ' for each
" time invention is a new species though of the same genus. ... If the
" painter performed each new work with that thirsting of mind and humility
" of purpose with which he did his first, how intense would be the result."
I have arranged a few passages chronologically to show that a quarter of a
century had not diminished the solicitude, or dulled the enthusiasm. The
original notes' are interspersed with lists of good subjects or " spines of
subjects," and are often illustrated by highly significant little " blots " (as
he called them), which in many cases were the germs of future works : —
[1856. Written to my mother from Kensington.] "... I have now
1 This portfolio, besides containing a few of the choicest specimens of the art of
"The Ancients" and their master, Blake, held certain etchings of Claude, some
portraits, and a few other works which made the collection altogether of exceptional
interest .

SAMUEL PALMER. ,,,
"no difficulties about the egg, which seems a material exactly suited to
•' me . . . You had some grand sunsets last week. I got some lines of
" them, straining my neck out of Ann's [the attic] window. Pencil lines of
" effects with the colours written arc now of the greatest use to me, as
•' I have coloured sketches from nature to supply the want of colour
" where it cannot be got ... I have now got in the egg a delightful
" material, and if I could gain knowledge as to more rapid completion of
" works I should be very glad. . "l
[1857.] "CONDUCT of a PICTURE. After reading in Black-
" wood's Magazine of December 1857, a quotation from Fergusson on
" Hindoo Architecture (' They built like Giants, and finished like
" Jewellers '), and after thinking of the Gothic cathedrals and the vast
" amount in both of absolute work and labour, it seems that landscape-
" painting is worth such labour, and that the moment for beginning is
" when the general effect has been obtained. Then should come the finish
" and enamel of the figures and the tracery of the near boughs and grass-
" flowers. The best place to begin with will be, I think, the high lights of
" foliage, getting the principal ones right by elaboration and design. This
" will prevent them being carelessly covered down and at once give
" mystery to the darks. First, general effect secured. Second, the tracery
" work, beginning with the lights. . . ."
[1858. Over a sketch of twilight.] " Finest twilights (with moon) of
" all, I think, which add to full splendour of colour the mystery of
" transparent vaporous gloom. Observed in Cornwall and at Margate
" after evening Church, July 18, 1858. In these days, there is an immense
" power of light ; searching, vast depths of gloom, and woods are very
" deep. Do not forget ; all is full of colour."
[1858. Over a pencil sketch.] " Obs : 1. Golden light catching on
" hillside of fine country with Rembrandt gradation and emphasis of woody
" hill in shade, of itself material for picture. Very light relatively to shade.
" Very full of rich golden colour, and velvety and real in texture.
[Sketch.] " ist day at Hartland. In valley towards Abbey. In wooded glens
" the most brilliant sunshine is very beautiful. And where the effect and
" arrangement are very vivid, one sees on half closing the eyes that the
" light is in detached shapes or patches.
1 I quoted in the last chapter a letter from Mr. Linnell written in 1838 advocating
the use of yolk of egg as a vehicle, and the allusion to the breakage of a bottle of the
mixture refers to still earlier experiments of my father's. I have several beginnings of
his in this material, in which I believe he completed a good many drawings ; but he
subsequently abandoned it, probably on account of its softness and susceptibility to
damp.

112 THE LIFE OF
"I am equally impressed by the vividness of light and vividness of
" colour. These imply that the shadows must be struck on an intensely
" deep key, and then one must get their clearness. Sky-gray lights and
" reflected lights as one can."
" 1859. I think I have hit the WHY, or at least the FACT of the
" most powerful effect structure for me. A mass of shade in centre, with
" one side hard and the other soft, [sketches] as my Morning of Life ;J
" but in this kind where the clash is between distance and sky, dark must
" be somewhere else ; and, I think, best organized thus [sketch] ; and the
" 2nd might differ from the principal by broken against smooth, figure
" against landscape, thus [sketch]. Perhaps I had better in future, D.V.,
" do my designs more neatly than heretofore and in sepia. . . . Besides
" the above, I think that although one side must (perhaps alternating) be
" sharper than the other, yet that the leading mass should be a SHAPE,
" telling at a distance."
' [1859.] "I mean never to do a landscape without some little figure
" story." " 1859. D.V., Sketches for Mr. Craven at once, and of use for other
" exhibition drawings. BEGIN at once. Try figures with bright local
" colour (pre Raffs : ) ; compose more carefully ; then at once paint the
" masses with oil-colour-like sweeps. Make washed gamboge and raw
" Sienna the key of yellow. If I can, get a foreground or two from nature.
" Try a silver morning, perhaps sunrise. Rich twilight. Remember
" principle [sketches]. By models or otherwise, avoid looseness in the
" focuses. Think of subjects which have for some time been discontinued,
" as sheep under trees, or in fold ; descending stubble-fields with village in
" deep distance, but always with figure story. Think of some passing
" event now India 2 is done. Why did the moonlight etching please every-
" body? Partly by structure and effect ; partly because the matter was not
" above comprehension, whilst it was a kind of matter which I most strongly
" feel. N.B. It grew out of a most simple thing — houses at Margate with
'' bars of moonlight. Could I find among my effects things as simple
" which would develop ? "
1 He probably refers to the water-colour drawing exhibited in 1859.
- In the Water-Colour Exhibition of 1859, among eight drawings, two were entitled
(186.) Returned from India, and (232.) A Letter from India. In the preceding year
No. 256. was Going to India. It is unnecessary to remind the reader of the events which
made any allusion to that country of interest at that time, and led my father to choose
such realistic titles for drawings that had nothing realistic about them.

SAMUEL PALMER.
1859. What must I do to attain excellence?

"3

" Increase what I love.
"What do I heartily love ? Much !
" Figures of antique grace and sentiment,
"and rich picturesqueness.
" Intense depth of shadow and colour.
"Mystery, and infinite going-in-i-tive-
"ness. "The focus, awell-head of dazzling light.
"The utmost deep and heaped up
"Devonshire richness.
"EFFECTS. Midsummer glowing
"Twilight, and rising moon, with trees of
" intensest depth. . . .
"Moonlight with firelight.
" Sunsets. Dawn. Silver Sunrise.
" Sunset through trees.
"Cloudy, fresh, dropping, spring morn-
"ing. One focus of cream white cloud."

Supply Deficiencies.
" Where am I weak ? (or rather ains !
" where am I not weak ?)
" Design figures vigorously. Consult
"model early. Taint them neatly.
" Conduct picture, so that from the first
" it may be sightly for its state. At the
" moment when I would shudder to show it
"let me pause and ask, ' why ? ' I ought to
"keep the shadows and half-tints flatter.
" Let me try to make the getting in exactly
"resemble OIL painting, with that broad
" suggestive smear in the half tints and in
" the landscape part of the lights. Painted,
"not glazed; as e.g. yellow ochre and
" emerald green for smooth grass — laid
"smooth, so as just to cover the paper.
"Even in skies — still more in landscape,
" lay the TINTS as nearly as I can of the
"relative intended depth, like a wood
cutter — leaving the gradations for the
" finishing."

[On the outside of a paper portfolio.] " Little Long, Exhibition, W.C.
" i860. Thoughts on RISING MOON, with raving-mad splendour of orange
" twilight-glow on landscape. I saw that at Shoreham. Above all this,
" one pinnacle might catch the fire of the last sunlight."
" August i860 . . . I am thinking oi North Devon with light luggage
" in travelling-bag, but the weather is not tempting so perhaps it will not
" transpire. For the future I mean to inquire wherever I go, after old
" manor-houses and mansions, and farm-houses which have been such.
" They are quite the gems of a neighbourhood ; and, if possible, we should
" always see the interior."
I think it is obvious that a great deal of what I have quoted, would not
have occurred to what is generally understood as a water-colour painter ;
and the contemporary drawings show much in their handling that suggests
the traditions of oil-painting, rather than those of the sister art. The
palette, as I have pointed out, was set with thick clots of easily-moved
colour. For emphatic touches and bold foreground work the pigment
thus prepared was laid upon the paper or cardboard,1 sometimes with very
large, flat, camel-hair brushes, sometimes with a palette-knife, sometimes
1 Paper was ultimately abandoned for cardboard of a particular kind, namely " Six
sheet London-board" on account of its marked deficiency in bearing out the pigments.
See Letter XLVII. 1

114 THE LIFE OF
with the finger, in " oil-colour-like sweeps." On the other hand, in the
extreme distances and more delicate parts, such as the faces of near
figures, there is the stipple peculiar to water-colour carried to a great
degree of refinement, and in nearly all finished drawings the use
of body-colour for the lights was forsworn. A notable example of
this peculiar handling exists in the beginning of a " Large Long "
drawing [27^ x 12^ inches] which hung, in the posthumous exhibition
of 1882 under the title of The fallen Tree. Across the foreground
lies the moss-grown trunk, broken off by some great gale. Against it
leans a girl listening to a youth who sits near her. From the mountain
side the eye wanders over an expanse of wild and romantic country
watered by a river threading its way towards the sea, and jewelled by
glittering cities. Among the cliffs pu the left stands a partly-ruined
fortress, frowning over the woods at its feet upon a deep ravine where the
evening sunshine has already been blotted out by shadowy mist. Some
mountains on the nearer sea shore gleam yet in the rosy light, and the
view is closed by a chain of gigantic jagged peaks covered with snow.
This drawing is chiefly interesting on account of the remarkable execution
of which it is a typical example. In the girl's head, in part of the lower
buildings of the fortress, and in the more distant country we find tinting
and stippling almost delicate enough for a miniature ; but in the outline
and shadow of the tree-trunk there is the boldest and most emphatic work
capable of being produced by great pens, and fat " oil-colour-like sweeps "
applied with the palette-knife ; the pigments being bistre of full depth
mixed with gum. One kind of work is in close juxtaposition with another,
but had the drawing been finished they could, no doubt, have been har
monized. Several of the principles set forth in the notes I have quoted-
are exemplified ; such, for instance, as " broken against smooth, figure
against landscape ; " and the shadows are " struck on an intensely
deep key."
Turning our attention from my father's purely artistic practice to his
social life at this time, we shall find a few passages from his letters to my
mother worthy of attention. [Kensington, 1856.] "I have risen at 7—
" breakfasted at \ past ... so I have begun, in a small way, to reform,
" and mean to get it all half an hour earlier if I can, and to keep to it
" inflexibly, so far as I am concerned.
"... Of all things, early bed and early rising are most distasteful to
" me ; but believing myself to have been ill-used and unjustly neglected as
" an artist, as well as in many other ways, I am willing to tax my strength
" to the uttermost to benefit my family ; and, perhaps, by not overrating
" my own powers of will but cultivating them to the last, may make this
" house a model of morning industry. . . "

SAMUEL PALMER. 115
[Kensington, 1856.] ... "I feel that I cannot neglect family
" reading and prayers without positive sin, and trust some plan may
" be devised by which it may be continued. The master of a family
"is, in a measure, responsible for the souls of his wife, children,
" and servants ; and cannot answer at the Judgment Seat, ' Am I my
" brother's keeper ? ' . . . I think, if possible, it will be best for me to
" go out of town with More directly his holidays begin, which I think is
" the middle of June ; but then we may have bad weather. On the other
" hand, NOW seems to be the time for weather useful to me. It is always
" a perplexity. It is quite true, as your father says, that my subjects are
" wasted upon such little drawings, but then comes the difficulty — not one
" large drawing was sold at our private view.
" How very touching and beautiful are the collects and psalms just now.
" I trust you will prepare for Holy Communion on Whit Sunday. It is
" specially a day of grace and sanctification to the faithful. In the bustle
" of life we see nothing but illusions : getting to church in good time and
" reading the psalms for the day before service begins, the poor world-
" withered heart begins to open like shrivelled leaves in a gentle summer
" shower ; and then we see things as they are, if we have kept our evil
" passions under discipline during the week, living in love and charity with
" ALL MEN. For this is the condition ; If from your heart ' ye forgive
" not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. '
" ' With what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged.' You know Herbert's
" lines, 'The Sundays of man's life,' &c.
" If we duly weighed God's blessings we should see and feel that the
" greatest of all was in the ability to go to church ; whether a cathedral, or
" the humblest of those grey turrets which are, to the Christian's eye, the
" most charming points of our English landscape— gems of sentiment for
" which our woods, and green slopes, and hedgerow elms are the lovely
" and appropriate setting. Landscape is of little value, but as it hints
" or expresses the haunts and doings of man. However gorgeous, it can
" be but Paradise without an Adam. Take away its churches, where for
" centuries the pure word of God has been read to the poor in their
" mother tongue, and in many of them most faithfully preached to the
" poor, and you have a frightful kind of Paradise left— a Paradise without
" a God. For the works of creation will never lift the soul to God until
" we have been taught that our Lord Jesus Christ is the ' Way,' and that
" ' no man cometh to the Father ' but by Him. Let not our thoughts
" wander to queer architecture like that of good Mr. G. . . .'s church, or to
" the dresses of the people. Ever remember when inclined to criticise
"persons or places, our Lord's 'What is that to thee? follow thou me.'
" We cannot be too severe upon our natural censoriousness and imperti-
1 2

n6 THE LIFE OF
" nent curiosity — our profane levity, and longings after something new.
' My son, fear thou the Lord and the King ; and meddle not with them
" that are given to change.' . . ."
[Kensington, 1856.] "... As to improvement in art, the whole disposi-
" tion of my time at this invaluable season which is now beginning, if it
" were arranged and invented on purpose to prevent it could not do it more
" effectually. My summers are literally wasted, while almost all other land-
" scape-painters are reaping some harvest from the country. I fully believe
" that now my choice in art is pretty well settled, I could make a much better
" income by living in the country than here, as my teaching is very little and
" for the last few years has been rather decreasing than otherwise. But
" whenever I have had an opportunity it has always been crossed, as it is
" now, by the difficulty of providing for the first year. There is also
" education of children for which London is the best place. ... I am
" prepared to lead a life hopeless of any earthly good, and to persevere to
" the utmost of my power in patient well-doing, unappreciated and
" ridiculed, and with a daily and hourly opposition which will no doubt
" shorten these days of mine, which have been most emphatically ' few
" and evil.'
" In about a week or ten days I must try to get out of town for a
" fortnight, that I may not lose this weather, which is my only chance of
" art renovation. . . .
" Nothing but house-cleaning has been going on since you were away,
" and I have let them clean out my study closets ; preferring the risk to an
" accumulation of dirt. Indeed there has been for a long time such a
" gradual diminution of books &c, that I am getting used to it, and
" have ceased to feel much annoyed at the reckless destruction of casts &c.
" in the attics, till at Mr. Cooke's the other day I saw in a prominent
" place over one of his parlour doors, a bas-relief [the same as that] which
" with several others of mine has long ago been destroyed. . . . What
" egregious blockheads we must be if we ever more attempt to vie with
" people who have fifty times our income ! 
" .... It is, I believe, an invariable truth that the better we are
" ourselves, the better shall we think of others. Satan is called the
" accuser of the brethren. Let us beware. Let us ' study to be quiet, and
" to mind our own business,' and not only talk of the ' charity which
" thinketh no evil,' but for once and for good, try to make our lives
" and our talk its embodiment. . . ."
[Kensington, August, 1858.] " - . It will require such undivided atten-
" tion to maintain and, d.v., improve the step which I have for the last two
" or three years, by the kind providence of God, made in public estimation,
" that for the future, when I settle down to my exhibition work it will not

SAMUEL PALMER. '117 /
" do for you to be absent. Therefore if you wish to stay at Redstone this
" year, it must be before I get my peep at Devonshire. I must therefore forego
" the harvest, and take my chance for a shot with the partridges over the
" stubble ; and in the meantime with my increased power of making use ot
" nature, I believe I am losing hundreds — eventually, perhaps, thousands of
" pounds. For were I now in some healthy country place with my materials,
" I might be making, partly out of doors, besides my more complicated
" exhibition drawings, some of those a positive commission for which I
" refused, leaving the matter open."
[Kensington, 1858.] "... I can begin my subjects better in London,
" but when Italian weather sets in I should like to go out of town directly,
" if it were only for a week, and take my drawings with me. The weather
" from which I get my subjects and my suggestions for the remainder of the v
" year is that dazzling weather when all the air seems trembling with little
" motes. A week of that is, to me, worth three months of ordinary fine
*' weather. It is then I see real sunsets and twilights.
" My little drawings seem to have done me real good with the artistic
" public. The secretary of one of the great provincial exhibitions called
" the other day to beg me to send something, and really I felt a little con-
" fused, as Lord Palmerston could not have been approached with more
" respect. This, of course, drew forth all my native loveliness ! So it was
" ' sweets to the sweet.' "
[Hastings, 1859.] " I feel a strange relief since the squally, strange
" change in the atmosphere. Before the two thunderous days, it was what
" I call gasping weather ; but since, although very close for this airy place,
" there is a delightful humidity in the air. I felt while the rain was pouring
" down, the refreshment which I suppose a plant feels under the same in-
" fluence, after drought. I DREAD the DUST of town, which withers me
" whenever I get out ; and if I could have my choice would prefer a
" month's incessant rain. You must see what an affliction it must be to
" me, anxious as I am after high excellence, to be as it were dodged and
" disappointed in all my attempts to get a sight of beautiful nature and
" strength to use it.
" I hope, d.v., when I return, to make a struggle for regularity as to
" the breakfast-hour ; to get four hours clear, good work before dinner ; and
" then, for the present, to take the rest of the day easily ; and when I get,
" D.v., stronger, to adopt Mr. Cope's plan of a Saturday holiday. But
" again I dread the dusty drought. Dr. Bell l will order me out, but I feel
" like Cain, ' Whither shall I go ? ' What a mockery to go out for health
" and refreshment into that dreadful granite-dust. And am I to see no-
1 My father was, at this time, a firm homoeopathist. It was an epidemic of credulity
which was then prevalent in Kensington.

n8 THE LIFE OF
" thing of that external loveliness which is my spring of successful work ? 0 !
" that I were nestled among those granite taws of dear Devonshire, 1500
" feet high. As soon as the Turners come [to the South Kensington
" Museum], I shall be out enough you may be sure, in the direction of
" Brompton, but I must see some out-door beauty, or my mind will
" perish  "
[Hastings, 1859.] "I have been very quiet and undisturbed here, which is
" much in my favour. I do not care about these things on my own account.
" I could go quietly like a poor sheep under the first hedge and lie down
" and die, so far as that goes ; but as a living flour-mill which has to grind
" corn for others, it is a source of alarm to feel that the machinery is quite out
" of order ... I seem doomed never to see again that first flush of summer
" splendour which entranced me at Shoreham; for what with east wind and
" mist I have seen little but Indian Ink. ... I have begun some designs
" to send to Manchester, [in sepia] but determining not to work much yet,
" have made little way. I was quite hurt to hear about poor dormouse's
" death. His life was too like what my own will be — short and unquiet.
"... Joy and thankfulness, or a broken-hearted old age, a man must look
" for from his children. I have only just enough strength to discharge my
" duties if everything goes well and rightly ; but domestic sorrows will
" soon break me up utterly ..."
[Kensington, 1859.] "... I work quite as much as I ought as to the
" time spent, and vary my work ; but I feel as if I were repeating myself, and
" have very little impulse or enjoyment in it. I don't know whether it pro-
" ceeds from body, or mind, or both, but my feeling all day is that of
" Macbeth. . . 'The wine of life is drawn,' the lees alone left. This is
" very important when one's calling is to amuse the public. There must be
" vigorous and intense feeling in works which are to make others feel, and
" after all I have gone through my work is a yoke and a burden which I
" would gladly shuffle off.
" I send you a very fine stanza from Mrs. Barbauld's Life, a poem
" written when she was very old. Madame D'Arblay used to repeat it to
" herself every night before she slept : —
" Life ! we've been long together,
"Through pleasant and through cloudy weather ;
" 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear ;
" Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear ;
' ' Then steal away, give little warning,
" Choose thine own time ;
" Say not Good-night, but in some brighter clime
"Bid me Good morning.
" I would rather have written this, than whole volumes of descriptive
" poetry such as the press now abounds with. . . ."

SAMUEL PALMER.

119

[Kensington, circa 1859.] "On Friday the 19th and Sunday the
" 2 ist, More officiated as organist at the teni])orary church at Earl's
"Court, playing them out on Sunday with the Hallelujah Chorus. He
" got through very well indeed. One of the psalm tunes he had never
" seen before. You have sometimes remarked that organs are a favourite
" topic here, but just now I do not know what you would say, as Mr. I. 
" is going again to the Continent, and has given More leave to practise on
" his beautiful instrument ! So our talk is of fugues, stop-diapasons, open-
" diapasons, double-diapasons, the swell, swell-couplers, principals, fifteenths,
" sesquialteras, bourdons, and double sets of 32-feet pipes I . .1 think
" the eagerness with which More takes up and perseveres with a favourite
" study is a very good sign, although I wish the subject had been painting
" rather than music, but boys sometimes take a sudden turn."
It will be seen that there is a considerable difference in tone between
the passages I have quoted from my father's purely artistic memoranda,
and these contemporary letters. In the former there are many evidences
of unabated enthusiasm — many hopeful plans and an abandon of delight
in the superlative beauty of nature. The latter speak of disappoint
ment, unjust neglect, wasted summers, and at last of his very work itself,
as " a yoke and a burden which he would gladly shuffle off." He seems
to be alternately building up castles in the air, and mourning over their
ruins ; sanguine one hour, desponding the next. He begins to long for a
country life, not only for the sake of his profession but because he dreads,
on account of his asthma, the dusty London summers, and the dark yellow
fog of November, in a neighbourhood where the fields and market-gardens
had retreated, little by little, before dreary rows of mansions. But an
exodus that was so easily accomplished in 1826 is quite another matter
now. He sees that he would be swamped by the want of capital before
he could recover himself from the loss of his first year's teaching. As it is,
any calamity such as prolonged illness would find him in evil case. He
therefore remains where he is, fretting over his troubles, perplexities, and
wasted time, and finding his only consolation in the growth of his eldest son.
He had apparently given up the hope of the boy following his own pro
fession,1 but the school successes promise so well, that he begins to think
of a university scholarship, and of holy orders. To this hope he sacrifices
everything ; and he is half prepared, if More goes to Oxford, to follow him
and begin life afresh.
It was thus that matters jogged along till the wintry spring of 1861.
More was now nineteen years old, and next but one to the head boy at
school. He had become a fair classic and a good musician, while he had
1 He had given him his first drawing-lesson when the boy was two years old !

120 THE LIFE OF
a genuine love for the best English literature. He had always been full of
energy which my father stimulated by every means in his power, and he
had been encouraged by every possible persuasion to work his hardest.
But just ahout this time he complained of lassitude and weariness, and he
longed for a quiet country holiday. Accordingly my father (after sending
in his drawings to the exhibition) started with his sketch-book and carpet
bag, in quest of lodgings. After much exploration in well-remembered
neighbourhoods he finally lighted on a lonely farm-house some miles from
Abinger in Surrey, and six or seven from Dorking. " High Ashes " was a
lovely spot lying on the slope of a valley between Holmbury Hill and Leith
Hill. The homestead itself stood at an elevation of some 500 feet, and from
its windows might be seen a splendid prospect. Many miles of wooded
country, enriched by ancient farms, stretched far away, till all vanished in
a faint grey line revealed by those clear days that foreshadow rain, as the
sea itself.
Everything was so happily quiet and bucolic — the scenery so beautiful,
that my father's anxiety to turn his back on the vapid suburb where he craned
his neck out of the attic window to catch a glimpse of a fine sunset between
the chimney pots, was redoubled. He had returned to Kensington after
he had settled his family at High Ashes, and he writes as follows to a lady
friend. [April, 1 86 1.] . . . "You will be pleased to hear that poor More is
" really better. They are all crammed into a little farm house just on the
" top of Leith Hill, the summit of which is 900 feet above the sea-level !
" More just crawls about and vegetates, and has taken my violin— is
" perhaps at this moment frightening the pigs with his first scrapings. Of
" course he can get no teacher there, but then he pegs very earnestly into
" anything he undertakes. He says he is living discreetly " a la cabbage,']
" and is going to press and preserve flowers.
" He has taken a huge chest of Latin and Greek books down (I
" forget how much they cost by railway), to attack by and bye, if it please
" the Divine Disposer to restore him."-
In May my father writes thus to my mother from Kensington : —
" To-day, Thursday, is like yesterday — thorough influenza weather. East
" wind, damp, cold, and fog. The houses in Albert Place loom through a
" dirty yellow fog, and the top of a tree in Kensington Gardens is but
" just visible. The gloom just now is overpowering. The London smoke
" is hovering over like a pall. The cold makes one's fingers ache after
" washing. " A horror came upon me this morning lest I should have killed More
" by finding so cold a place as High Ashes. . . . Since the balmy weather
ceased (Balmy !) we have been obliged to have winter fires ; and as to

SAMUEL PALMER. 121
" outlining, designing, inventing, it has been quite out of the question.
" Depressed as I am, I have still the English will about me — to fight to
" the last and die at my post. I think, n.v., I may yet conquer by taking
" in a whole system-full of new blood from nature.
" Half-past eight. The darkness increases, and the foul smells of
" London come in through every crevice. . . ."
[Kensington, May, 1861. To my mother.] " I am too poorly to work
" any longer here, and should spoil everything I touch, so I think I had
" better come, and then we can all consult as to what is best. . . . The
" spare room will do very well for me if it become warm enough to
" work in it without a fire. ... I think the thing to save us, d.v.,
" would be four months, or five, of my work in the country. ... If
" I cannot come after all, and settle to work, I ought to know at
" once ; but dreadful waste of time seems to be my lot, much as I desire
" the contrary. . . . When will it all end ? I really think, much as I hate
" rash steps, that poor Kensington is no longer the place for us.
" I have yet, thank God, stamina enough left to work hard and
" vigorously in the country, and why should not I, as well as others with
" the degree of reputation I now have, raise it very very much. Then we
" might perhaps afford two houses. . . . O ! my poor work. Guineas are
" being lost by hundreds, in losing the spring."
[Kensington, May, 1861. To my mother.] "... Without positively
" taking an extra room could you try what sort of bargain you could
" make. ... A decent painting light, not overshadowed by trees, is
" essential. I do not intend, in my present vexed and feverish state of
" mind, to rush to work, but to walk gently round and see what there
" is, so as to get calm if I can. I do want to try what I can do, having
" nature at hand."
[Kensington, May, 1861. To my brother.] "... The month of
" May is always more prolific in the effects I paint than any other :
" and as my drawings are ai'owedly hung out of the way because they
" are said to kill everything else, I think of trying one or two cool ones
" this year ; perhaps of early mist clearing up over the distant country
" (but my kind of cool effects do not last beyond the month of
" May), nor will anything but wide prospects and a range like that
" of Leith Hill suit me. I am therefore anxious to come down as soon
" as possible . . . perhaps there is some room, or unoccupied granary,
" or such-like, in which they would let me work. This is a matter for im-
" mediate consideration, as the picked effects will soon be over, and
" everything settle into summer heat. Is there any loft in those barns you
" enter by?"
Finally my father's wish was fulfilled and he joined us at " High

122 THE LIFE OF
Ashes," where he found more genial weather and an abundant supply of
subjects. Notably, there was a day's sheep-washing in a beautiful old mill-
pond to which we walked through great pine-woods. The shearing in the
barns, the branding, and many other farming occupations kept him busy
with his sketch-book, and he also began two or three water-colours of his
then favourite long proportion.1
As for the invalid, his rambles in the knee-deep heather, or in the
cool brook-threaded valleys, however great a contrast to the Kensington
constitutionals, had not done so much for him as was hoped, and the
chest of books remained unopened. My father wrote out a long statement
of the case for the use of the doctors and it sets forth that, about the
middle of May, there had been a change for the worse, but that after this
the young man was able to " walk slowly with a stick." Then they got him
a donkey-chaise ; and twice a day, with my mother walking beside him, he
rode propped up with pillows in the shade of the sighing pines. It was
about this time, that my father wrote thus, to his old friend Mr. J. C.
Hook : — " ... I have been three weeks helping to nurse my elder son, who
" has over-studied and exerted himself, and who is so seriously ill that,
" unless he mends, it will not be right for me to leave ; but the ever-pleasant
"memory of the days spent with Mrs. Hook and yourself at Hambledon
" will urge me to come again, unless duty says ' no.'
" They have so built us up with great houses at Kensington as to
" destroy the elasticity of the air, and to make a climate always tepid,
" muddy. " I find I cannot breathe there, nor do half the work I could get
~" through elsewhere, and so I am looking about for some large cottage or
" small farm-house near a railway. I explored Guildford, but in vain, and
" I do not like it. I came here, and in a week felt well. My wife also
" has derived great benefit from it, but I am quite disheartened at the
" difficulty of finding anything at once pretty high, with a dry soil, and
" near a railway station. I suppose there is no hope of [succeeding] in
" your neighbourhood, but I have sometimes cast longing eyes to the vicinity
" of Hindhead . . . ."
It is useless to give a full history of the succeeding weeks. As June
passed and the warm hand of summer daily clothed the beautiful country
with new loveliness, it became evident that my brother's brain, long over
taxed, had severely suffered. Yet there was hope, and on the 2nd of July he
wrote hopefully to a friend, of having turned the corner of his disease and
of looking for a return of health. Nine days later the pale shadow that
had once been the " hope and ornament " of my father's existence kissed
' These were " Large Longs," measuring 2"]\ x 12^ inches.

'

I
If WA

.

A Churchyard Yew.

SAMUEL PALMER. 123
him for the last time, and very early in the morning of the following day,
bade a weary life farewell.
That awful cry that rang out of old over all the land of Egypt never
echoed more mournfully than at " High Ashes " farm. It was very gently
that they prepared the father for the news that his first-born was dead ;
but he rushed from the house in bewildered agony and never re-entered it.
One of the doctors, seeing his critical condition, drove him in his carriage
to the house of his brother-in-law, Mr. James Linnell, at Red Hill, and he
saw Abinger no more from that day.
The mother followed her son for the last time through the shadows of
the pines, and laid him beneath the yew-tree in Abinger Churchyard, near the
ancient woods known by the familiar name of Evelyn. Not long before he
had sketched the very spot where he was buried, while he was on a walking
tour with a school-fellow, little thinking how soon he would repose in that
quiet place.

CHAPTER V
l86l TO ABOUT 1876
In resuming the story of my father's life after the death of his son we
have to do with the life of a changed man— a man whose most cherished
hopes had been dashed to pieces ; whose remorse and deadly grief shook
the very foundations of his character. I say remorse because, now that it
was too late, it undoubtedly dawned upon him that he had done unwisely
in taxing to the uttermost a willing and precocious intellect unprotected by a
strong physique. It was a secret remorse for he would never acknowledge,
and indeed he denied that he had, in any way whatever, forced his son along
the fatal path. I have heard my father described, and by one of his warmest
admirers, as a man " full of theories." Of all these, his theories on the
subject of education and the management of the young were perhaps most
often in his mind, and were those upon which he had most prided himself.
The result (as may be guessed by an allusion or two in his letters, written
after the calamity) added a refinement of bitterness to what he was called
upon to suffer. The " finger of scorn," as he says, could be pointed at him
as one who had egregiously failed in that very thing of all others in which
he had promised himself success.
Strange as it may seem, in the descriptions my father wrote of his suffer
ing at that time there is no hyperbole. Even reason itself must have had
a struggle for the mastery and, for a moment, the darkest forms of despair
cast a sombre shadow over the faith that half a century of trial and trouble
had not shaken. Even two months after the death my father wrote,
" yesterday was the only day a part of which I have not passed in bitter
weeping." Much did he owe at this dark time to the generous help and touching
kindness of those true friends he was so fortunate in possessing. To the
end of his life he remembered this kindness as vividly as the cause ; and,
when he could, repaid it.
The parents returned to Kensington only to prepare for immediate
removal, and then there arose the miserable question, whither to go ? The
country had lost its charm. That " eternal loveliness " which my father
had found "the spring of successful work," and that "first flush of summer
splendour " which had so entranced him at Shoreham had vanished for

THE LIFE OF SAMUEL PALMER. 125
ever, and to seek them any more seemed utterly vain. He writes : — " My
" loss has made me so incapable of personal gratification from external
" objects, that what is called a beautiful view gives me no more real
" pleasure than the contemplation of a kitchen sink.' On the other hand,
if he was to take up the now grievous burden of his work to any purpose
he must be near London. Here again, although his friends did all they
could for him, it was in vain ; so it came to pass at last that we found
ourselves, for the time being, in a little lodging on Red Hill Common.
Early in September 1861, after some fruitless explorations, he took a cottage
in the old town of Reigate, near which two friends of his youth had settled.
The neighbourhood was chosen almost entirely on my mother's account,
because it was near Mr. Linnell's house, but my father would certainly have
preferred almost any other. Excessive damp soon drove her to " Redstone,"
crippled by rheumatism, and she was forced to leave her husband to a
nearly solitary and inconceivably miserable sojourn of six months.
While still in the lodgings at Red Hill Common he had made this
entry in his common-place book : — " If it be the Divine will that I
" live on after this calamity I must try to do my DUTY — my duty
" towards God and my duty towards my neighbour. My wife and child
" are my nearest neighbours. I must use my calling for their support.
" How can I make works which will cheer others when quite cheer-
" less myself? Perhaps thus, ist, choosing themes I loved, for I love
" no art themes now ; 2nd, very simple and massive in effect ; 3rd,
" getting in whole effect (after the figures are well designed) at a heat ;
" 4th, sufficient model realization ; 5th, delicate pencilling. Can etching
" be made productive ? Vanity of vanities. August 28, 186 1."
This awakening from the stupor of grief to a sense of duty was
followed by a struggle to check a relapse by hard work, and as the result,
no less than five drawings appeared in the summer exhibition of 1862.
Far from his artist friends and his favourite haunts, it is little to be
wondered at that the instant he laid down his brush or pencil he seized
upon a book. In this old and favourite consolation he found some relief
from the bitter thoughts that every unoccupied moment loosed upon him.
He wrote thus to a young lady : — " I don't suffer much from solitude in
" the evenings. I spring upon my books. I always spoke a good word
" for solitude, and it is grateful to me. Books ward off the ghastly
" thoughts." My father had one devoted companion — a little black cat. It was a
strange preference, and the same as that of his friend Francis Finch who har
boured all stray cats that would stop with him. He writes : — " I never
" think of London without one pleasant reminiscence — its fecundity of
" cats. A fine cat is often the one beautiful ornament in a drawing-room.

126 THE LIFE OF
«' Then he does not set up for somebody else, make capital out of
" philosophy, or stick at inflicting capital punishment on a noisy canary-
" bird.1 Nor does he eat by accident, or affect an odious indifference to
" the quality of his food. He masticates vigorously, which Cobbett said
" was so good a sign in ' young ladies.' Give him fried fish and he
" purrs as he masticates." There is certainly an undoubted sentiment of
cosiness 2 which a cat embodies as it basks before the fire, which my father
loved. The rackety, demonstrative, though utterly disinterested affection
of a dog, and especially the tendency to fidget, would not have harmonized
so well with the old volumes which beguiled the winter evenings at " Park
Lane Cottage " as " Trot's " complacent purring.
The letters and memoranda written at this time seem to me to require
some explanation on account of their showing an apparent want of self-
control. We are accustomed to see men, and even women, suffering from
the most cruel bereavements, and yet going about their duties calm, reticent,
and dry-eyed. We must, however, make due allowance for differences of
temperament, and differences of physical robustness. Those who are
endowed with an unusually large amount of the imaginative faculty are
sometimes peculiarly susceptible to the influences of joy, grief, or dis
appointment. Although, like children, they are more easily moved to joy
or to sorrow than the average of men, these emotions should no more be
condemned as shallow than the temperament of the others should be con
demned as callous and phlegmatic. " How well so-and-so bears his loss,"
is one of the commonest expressions of every-day life ; but it would be
equally to the point to say, " How strong is So-and-so's nervous system."
If my father be judged by the usual standard of reticence and self-control
he will be judged, unjustly.
Although books were a great consolation, out of despair itself a consola
tion still greater had arisen. He wrote : — " If we will but be still and listen,
" I think we shall hear these sad trials talking to us ; saying as it were,
" ' You have known life and enjoyed it, you have tried it and suffered from
" it ; your tent has been pitched in pleasant places among those of dear
" relations and tried friends, and now they are disappearing from around
" you. The stakes are loosened one by one, and the canvas is torn away,
1 My father, loving conversation, loathed canaries.
a How my father valued cosiness the following words show. "I have often
" sympathised with such of the poor dear Irish as destitution has plucked from their cabins
"into the well- ventilated unions. That these cabins are smoky, dirty, and painful to the
" olfactory nerves we know, but then they are SNUG, and how much lies in that little
" word, to poor benighted Englishmen, callous to France, and progress, and glory. Did
" you never put your feet in the fender and, as it were, fold yourself up, and wish you
" could roll yourself up like a dormouse ? . . . I have bathed day and night, summer and
" winter, but confess that a cosy corner is the thing to sit down in."

SAMUEL PALMER. n7
" with no vestige left behind, and you want something which will uo be
" taken away. You want something large enough to fill your heart, and
" imperishable enough to make it immortal like itself. That something is
" God. Having Him, you will possess all things ; having Him nut, you
" will be impoverished for ever. You feel how earth's sweetest pleasures,
" love and friendship, bequeath a legacy of anguish when thev leave us •
" then, for the years which remain, TRY THE GREAT KXl'LRIMEN T,
" and take up the cross of Jesus Christ.'
" Thus it is that calamity seems to speak to me, and thus it has spoken
" to others in all ages. . . I detest cant as much as any one, but am
" drawing near to the end of my race ; and although anything but credu-
" lous — rather too sceptical perhaps ! — yet I do heartily believe that union
" with Jesus Christ in the Sacrament is the one thing upon the planet
" which is true, rational, and real ; that most other things are temporary
" fallacies, very well in their way, but verv vain."
The Reigate cottage having proved unsuitable, my father, once again,
had to begin a search for some permanent and healthy home. But not
being well fitted at the best of times for business-like investigations, or the
complex problems of a house-hunt, he felt himself helpless.
He was at this time frequently corresponding with his friend Mrs.
Gilchrist, vvho had just lost her husband. Resolute and brave in the midst
of her sorrow, she had " tramped it wearily over nearly all that angle of
country between the Hog's Back, Guildford, and Hindhead," in search of a
new home. Writh her London house let over her head and each day
bringing with it " fullest measure of labour and suffering," she had tramped on
till she lighted on the lovely village of Haslemere where she ultimately
settled. My father knew it well, and delighted in the gradual blending of
the rich, cultivated land with the moor above. He himself seems to have
had serious thoughts of settling down there, having vainly explored, he says,
the whole of the rest of Surrey near the railway. Nevertheless, he seemed
tethered to the neighbourhood of London by prudential motives, and
he lacked the enterprise that discovers and appropriates the choicest
homes of the earth. In May, therefore of 1862 he decided on a small
detached house 2 at Mead Vale, Red Hill ; not by any means his ideal
residence, but a pleasant contrast to the damp cottage where he had spent
the dreariest winter of his life.
Hardly a mile away and near the well-known Red Hill Junction there
stood, on flat, swampy ground, as ugly a town as you could find, with no
history beyond the history of the railway, and no old association. West-
1 My father was fond of saying this, greatly to the amusement of some of his friends.
2 After living there nineteen years, he describes himself as being "in the midst" of
what is to him "the most emphatic solitude, a growing railway town."

128 THE LIFE OF
wards, however, a pretty valley opened out, formed between the same great
downs which cradled Shoreham and an uneven, sandy range which, at
a lower elevation, runs parallel for a long distance.
Perched upon this range of sand, and about four hundred feet above the
sea, stood " Furze Hill House," a solitary vedette of the neighbouring brick
and mortar army. It had not long been built and was what house-agents, for
some inscrutable reason, call a " Gothic villa." Pretentious outside and
inconvenient within, it was undoubtedly "genteel "; so the new tenant imme
diately gave a grand name to everything. The drawing-room he called " The
saloon " ; one bedroom " The boudoir " ; another, which was damp,
" Bronchitis Bower ; " and a little downstairs closet (where some of his old
books had to be stored away), "The Butler's Pantry."
The terraced garden was less pretentious, and was divided by a holly
and laurel hedge (greatly beloved of nightingales and whitethroats) from a
steep furze-field, where there were to be seen, according to the season, clots
of golden blossom, masses of brakes far taller than your head, or the blush
of heather. Two sloping lawns with cedars and deodaras round which the
rabbits chased each other led the eye downwards to a copse of larch and
beech, which seemed to teem with birds and squirrels. This was so far
below that, but for a dark crown of Scotch fir, one could see above the
topmost sprays, stretching far away without a break, many miles of Surrey
and Sussex ; till, with the quiet gradations of English scenery, the landscape
merged in the grey outline of the great South Downs full thirty miles
away. After heavy rains, and much to my father's joy, the " Sullen Mole "
revealed itself as a veritable river, winding in and out among the meadows.
To the eastward, the hills of Kent bounded the view, and nine miles on
the right in the opposite direction, a great spur of sand culminated in the
summit of Leith Hill.
By degrees my father became accustomed to his sorrow, but he
writes thus about this time to an old friend: — "I fancy you can
" hardly enter into the feeling with which I rise in the morning; not a
" murmuring against Providence, but the painful stooping, as it were, to
" take up the burden of the coming day — a longing to be let off; a
" feeling of utter incompetence to the task ; no hopeful motive and no
" strength." It was, however, a very strongly-marked peculiarity of his temperament
that, in spite of the terrible reality and permanence of his grief, the time
came when a superficial observer might have supposed that he had
completely shaken it off. In society he appeared so cheerful, so animated
in conversation, and so ready to join in a hearty laugh, that a friend who
saw him only as a guest has remarked that he seemed a bon-vwant.
Those, however, who had greater opportunities of studying him, knew that

SAMUEL PALMER. l2l)
the last caress of his little daughter at Grove Street, and that moment
of anguish in the early summer's morning at High Ashes were never
forgotten. He was one of those vvho love the society of their children, and as we
were now thrown more together than before, I soon learned to look upon
him not only as a most indulgent teacher, but as a favourite companion ;
and although he never joined in any regular game, he made the innumer
able hours I spent in his society seem delightful.
He knew well the inestimable value of a school and university training,
but unfortunately for me, the catastrophe of his life, and the great crash of
all his theories made him shrink from sending his last child away from
home. He therefore determined to ground me in what he himself
considered as essentials, and everything hinged upon his own ideal —
Elements and Accuracy, manual accuracy being included. He writes :—
" The peculiar excellence of skilful home teaching seems to me to he
" in the earliest lessons being made pleasant. Beguile a child into his
" A, B, C, instead of beating him into it. Teach him to read so as to
" make him like the sight of a book rather than hate it, and you have done
" a great work. All attainment is difficult. Ill-tempered teaching goes
" near to make it impossible. As the child grows older idle fits will come
" sometimes, and there may be need of a little correction ; but, from what
"' I remember, I think the parents are usually much more in fault than the
" children. They expect the little creatures to take pains to learn while
" they will not take pains to teach ; and so, for every cuff they give the
" children they deserve a dozen ; and pretty hard ones too."
As early as I can remember I had been promoted (sitting in my baby
chair) to help him to fasten in his drawings with paste and paper, for the
exhibition, an opportunity for mischief and mess which he turned into an
elementary lesson in painstaking. Toys were very rare, but I scarcely
missed them, for there were a hundred little things to do, connected with
art, which he managed to make amusing. Few would have patiently borne
with the bungling of childhood in like matters, but it was an important
point in my father's method of teaching to set me things to do that really
wanted doing, and to point out that disastrous consequences would follow
failure. By this teaching, and by his own example, he gradually fixed in
my mind a conviction that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing
well, and that few things can be done in a worthy manner without patience.
Elements, Accuracy, Method, Patience, Humility — these were the cardinal
points in my father's teaching.
He attached great importance to the regular lessons, which included
Latin, arithmetic, drawing, and English ; but these were administered in
doses which, nowadays, would be considered infinitesimal. K

130 THE LIFE OF
I was attacked severely by entomological mania, and following the
example of a friend whose enthusiasm found vent in collecting beetles, I
spent many hours in the pursuit of butterflies and moths. Now, strangely
enough, my father, even in boyhood, had never been smitten with the
collecting mania in any form, and he seemed to be utterly without the fell
passion known as acquisitiveness. Nevertheless, he allowed me to gloat
over my captures, thinking that good might come in the shape of nicety of
handling, and habits of observation.3 I can remember, however, that
when I sought to arouse his enthusiasm in the same direction by showing
him my boxes and setting-boards, I was surprised by an indifference which
I could not understand, and was told sometimes, in Pope's words, that
" The proper study of mankind is man." Writing to the friend I have
just mentioned, my father said, "Forgive my weakness about beetles,
" only don't neglect the other B — Biography. It's biography that makes
" moral muscle. All the great men have set venerated models before them,
" and tried to work up to them."
It is worthy of note that, although keenly and vigilantly observant of
so many natural phenomena, my father knew and was content to know-
but little of our native natural history. He could not have passed the
most absurdly elementary examination in botany, entomology, ornithology,
or geology. For all worthy handicrafts and all mechanical tools he taught a rever
ence which he himself seemed to feel very strongly ; although with the
same kind of inconsistency as before, he had never cultivated manual
dexterity. He says "... we might but too surely lament a moral debase-
" ment, where a court dress was looked upon with more respect than a
" carpenter's tool-basket. The things in harmony with religion and art
" (not on any account confounding the two), are not fashionable follies, but
" tool-baskets, spades and ploughs, house-brooms, dusters, gridirons, and
" pudding-bags. Were the smell of soap-suds more exhilarating, I would
" add the boiler and the implements of washing, in honour of that type of
" lady-hood, the dear Princess Nausicaa who, in a warmer climate,
" invoked Neptune for the laundry." My father forswore nice furniture and
1 The study of natural history, within proper limits, is so invaluable a training for
children, and so fascinating a recreation for their elders, that I wonder it is ever omitted
in some form or other from the education of those who have the opportunity of pursuing
it. The very least it does, is to bring them face to face v\ ith thousands of the most
beautiful objects and the most marvellous events — objects and events to which they are
otherwise absolutely blind. It gives a zest and a peculiar charm to every country walk ;
peoples the hills, the valleys, the streams and the very air, with innumerable friends \
trains the mind to explore, little by little, the fairyland of science — trains the eye to see,
the hands to handle deftly, and the feet to wariness. Yet how many are brought up blind,
and deaf, and callous, to the teaching of this wondrous world and all that is therein, that
lh<=y may enter so early the priesthood of the Great God Mammon.

SAMUEL PALMER. ,3I
other fittings for his study, in favour of rough, clumsy shelves, primitive
palette-racks, mended chairs, and decrepit tables, because all this mending
and making taught me, and encouraged me to do my best ; while at the
same time, everything was a protest against what he was pleased to call
" Cursed Gentility." In his study he intrenched himself against every
thing genteel, as he would have done against an insidious and potent
disease raging all round him. There he felt at home, but among the
drawing-room " Fal Lais " he was out of his element. The "staff" he
carried in the garden was an ancient and worm-eaten umbrella-stick,
clumsily whipped with string here and there. His old shoes were labori
ously patched by an entirely original process of our own ; and worn-out
garments, condemned by the authorities, were rescued and secretly repaired
in ways unknown to tailors.
Now in boyhood he had been a bit of a dandy for a time (as he had
been a bit of a free-thinker), bedecking himself in white trousers and
flourishing a whangee cane ; but one day, when he was abroad in his glory,
he came abruptly upon his full length reflection in a shop window. There
was a pause, and then he said to himself, " No more finery for a gentleman
as short as you ! " Thenceforth he gave up all pretensions to grand
apparel, and in after life his dress, though always plain and sometimes
eccentric, was made with due regard to comfort, hard wear, and pocket
capacity. He often quoted the lines :—
" Learn thou the goodness of thy clothes to prize,
" By their own use, and not another's eyes,"
and as he hated affectation nearly as sturdily as fashion, he was safe from
the temptations (whatever they may be) of the " artistic " or " aesthetic "
style of dress.
He regarded ridicule very little in the attainment of any object he-
thought a worthy one. " It seems to me," he wrote, " that while nothing
" is more silly than eccentricity for its own sake, few things are more
" pernicious than the dread of being peculiar." And again, " How many
" acquaintances can we tell off on our fingers, who will dare to be singular
" — who will draw a line, and halt, and say ' No ' ? But to tell off those
" who will be sure to ' follow a multitude to do evil,' if it be only a fashion-
" able multitude, we need have the fingers of Briareus."
As far back as I can recollect, my father had generally worn on state
occasions, a loose and lengthy broadcloth coat of a rather peculiar cut, and
full of pockets so ample that, at a pinch, they easily engulfed a sketching
outfit. A double-breasted waistcoat, buttoned high and close over the formal
folds of an old-fashioned white cravat, added to a clerical appearance which
was sufficiently great to cause a country clergyman, on one occasion, to
request, through the clerk, his assistance in the service. K 2

132

THE LIFE OF

A pair of old-fashioned silver spectacles with very broad rims was used
for distant objects; but on the state occasions aforesaid, these were
exchanged for spectacles of the ordinary pattern, which once lost, he with
his near sight, sometimes trod upon, and afterwards groped for with much
grumbling at the prejudices of genteel mankind. Blake's great, round,
steel-rimmed glasses, bleared by many a year of use, were among my father's
very few personal treasures. This fewness was another of his peculiarities,
for who has not a little collection of very favourite belongings ? I never knew
him to possess a single article of jewellery, and even of his family crest he
was content to have nothing better than a single wax impression. So quiet
and uneventful was the nature of his present life, that he found no use even
for a watch. His pockets, however, were replete with chalks, lead pencils,
charcoal, sketch-books, and keen knives, besides a certain old wooden
snuff-box of rich, golden hue. This resembled the tint of some of Titian's
flesh-colour, and was used by " The Ancients," in their visits to the Dulwich
Gallery and other collections, as a chromatic Shibboleth. Three or four
recently-received letters were generally carried in the ample waistcoat
pockets, and on the envelopes many a design had its birth, the tiny " blot "
being hardly larger than the postage-stamp.
My father seemed naturally nocturnal in his habits. He speaks of
" Blessed Green-tea-time winding up to Hamlet and ecstacy "; of " early bed
and early rising " being of all things most distasteful to him ; and we have
seen how " The Ancients " revelled in the small hours. Now, as then, the
early tea was looked forward to as the fore-runner of a quiet time when he
could take up a favourite author or a new design after the day's work, or
indulge in one of his chief pleasures, letter-writing. Notwithstanding this,
he was never a very late riser till the " drousie days " of age overtook him.
At this period of his life breakfast was generally over in good time and
was invariably followed by family prayers, which were another symptom
of his originality. He read the Bible and Apocrypha without regard to the
Lectionary, and he often recurred to certain favourite chapters ; but his
selection generally had some motive. Over and over again, as years went
by, he read us the story of Judith and other favourite episodes ; but the
greatest favourite of all was the history of Ahab, and especially the incident
of Naboth's vineyard. Jezebel was established as a typical woman, to
whom he compared, rather uncharitably, the modern woman of fashion.
Indeed, so frequent were his allusions to Jezebel's supposed love of finery
that, with his friends, " Jezebel Top " became a synonym for the small
fashionable bonnet.
He abhorred few things more than quick reading and the modern custom
of abbreviating the preterites, the last being in his opinion a barbarous
innovation, destroying the rhythm of the old English. Even in church, I

SAMUEL PALMER. \y,
have seen his face darken with anger under the monotonous, scrambling drone
of the young, high-church reader. He himself read in a very different way.
Without any conventional religious tone, any affectation, or any effort, he
sent the story home to the minds of his hearers, and brought the characters
before them. But there were passages when his emotion mastered him time
after time, and he had to lay down the book. One of these was the i i th
chapter of St. John's Gospel,1 which seemed to go straight to the heart ol
a man longing more and more for reunion with those whom he mourned.
Although he loved the Church of England liturgy, for home use he preferred
extempore prayer. This was highly original and intensely earnest.
In the summer he would generally spend half an hour or so in the garden
after prayers. Then, having set me my lessons, he would retire to his
study, and work till our early dinner-time with a concentration of thought
and inflexibility of industry which would have done honour to a man of
half his years. It was work of such a kind that had he continued longer
without a break it would have been at the expense of what he had already
done. A short siesta after dinner was often provoked by a pipe, and by
some light literature, such as a novel, which he seldom allowed himself
except at this time : and then came work again, till our tea at five o'clock.
Afterwards, we strolled out together in the long evenings, through fields of
young corn, or grass, or sweet-scented trefoil, to see the sunsets. Few
sunsets have seemed comparable in beauty to those he showed me, and
when he could go no longer the twilights seemed to lose half their poetry.
It was not merely that he so cordially admired or understood so well
the beauties of the aerial tints, or that he could point them out with pecu
liarly well-chosen words. In the enjoyment added by his presence there
was something far more subtle than this, and beyond the power of words to
describe. It was probably akin to what he himself had experienced when
walking with Blake.
His pleasure in thunderstorms was quite as keen as in the days when the
peals, rolling from combe to combe among the hills, had called forth " The
Ancients" from the Shoreham Cottage; and now, as a tempest crept
towards us in the twilight over the landscape— the flashes, to his delight,
sometimes revealing stupendous chains of cloud mountains— we simply
revelled in the sight, till the great drops upon the dust and the crash of
near thunder drove us indoors.
In all our summer rambles, the abundant wild flowers delighted my
father more and more. He did not study them botanically, or horticul-
turally, or altogether artistically. He knew scarcely any of their names ;
but he loved them so well that at last a corner was set apart for them near
1 There are several allusions in his letters to Lieven's Raising of Lazarus, a work
which, agreeing with Fuseli, he thought worthy of the subject.

134 THE LIFE OF
his study window, under protest from the domestic authorities and from
that agricultural implement the gardener. But my father was inexorable,
and although his favourites were once or twice surreptitiously flung over
the hedge, he brought them back or replaced them. He wrote to
Miss Redgrave (a very favourite correspondent of his), ". . . . I will
" have my weeds though ! The white convolvuli are commencing 1
" their tortuosities (to speak in Reigate dialect), and Herbert has
" made a bench for the arbour. Miss Mary [a new housemaid] com-
" menced weeding the other day, and pulled up both my hairbell roots,
" that I have been coaxing for three years into the garden." This
was an incident which led to an unwonted explosion of wrath on my
father's part. The "weeds " became a by-word, and nobody understood his
pleasure in them, or saw their beauty. Some gave us infinite trouble, and
pined away, in spite of a system of artificial irrigation suggested by a passage
in the Georgics. All we did was accomplished clumsily and with labour ;
moreover the soil was so barren, our supply of water often so inestimably
precious (for we depended entirely on the rain) that everything was
against us. I do not think I have ever seen my father do anything with
greater care and pleasure than, in the dry summer weather, the doling out
of a little water to his favourite "weeds."
The garden had other attractions for us than the hardly-earned frag
rance of our wild flowers, and the songs of the birds which abounded
there ; for we cut lanes in the undergrowth of the shrubs leading unawares
to tiny, sylvan arbours, whence we could get a peep of distant country.
Then, by means of prodigious expense of time and toil, we raised a small
hillock (" The Specular Mount," as we call it), whence, over a very un-
classical paling, we could get a downward glimpse of the steepest slope of
the hanger, and imagine if we liked, that it was haunted by a Faun or two,
or perhaps by a beautiful Dryad.2 And so, in our own esteem, this very
little and very ordinary garden seemed to lose its primness and gentility,
gradually changing into a charming wilderness, and it pleased us as much
in its way as if it had been a garden of King Alcinous himself.
The wisdom of the head of a family may sometimes be guessed by the
way that family spends Sunday, and there are an infinitude of grada
tions between those who treat it as a holiday, or as an ordinary day of
1 I do not think my father was aware that this verb or its derivatives is used certainly
once by Spenser and seven times by Shakespeare.
2 My father was particularly delighted to use as part of the material for "The
Specular Mount " a large heap of the kitchen breakages. Female destructiveness and
strength in 'destruction was a favourite topic with him. "I could wish," he writes, "that
"the tender creatures had not contrived to split my strongest brass-backed saw, bent the
' ' very toughest of my carpenter's tools which they have borrowed, and sown successive
"cinder-heaps with snuffers. But they know best."

SAMUEL PALMER. ,35
work, and others vvho compose their solemn faces to a day of austerity
and straitlaced idleness; forcing their very babies to put away their toys,
and frowning down all merriment. With artists, especially, Sunday is
often regarded little. They paint, or haggle with some dealer, or show
their pictures to crowds of visitors, if it be at exhibition-time. .None ol
these things had my father "done. He rigorously observed Sunday through
out his life, but with no fanatical austerity : anil spent with him, 1 found
it the happiest day of the seven. While his health allowed it, he was
regular in his attendance at morning service, but afterwards there was
much that might be read, and much that might be done both indoors and
out. Unaffected piety was as marked a feature in his character as a
craving for knowledge ; but he never attempted to cram either intellectual
or moral food down unwilling throats. The young mind was allured, but
never driven to its fairest pastures. The pursuit of wisdom and virtue
was inculcated much by precept, but more by example, while the knowledge
of baseness and evil, without being forbidden, was made to appear unattrac
tive by the tempting beauty of the opposites.
The winter evenings brought their own resources, and were often
begun with a hit or two of backgammon, my father's only game. All
other games he disliked, as usurping the place of reading and conversation,1
and I can hardly imagine his handling a cue or a pack of cards. The
backgammon over, he would take up a novel by Scott or Dickens, or
oftener, his Shakespeare, Chaucer, or some other favourite old poet, and
read to us till my bed-time, when he returned once more to the congenial
solitude of his study ; where he read, or wrote, or designed, till ' a late
hour. There .were occasional visits to London, all of which bad some impera
tive object far apart from mere pleasure-taking. Perhaps it was some
notable exhibition of the Old Masters, perhaps the investigation of some
new photo-mechanical process, or the proving of an etching ; but in the
pencil list of things to be done, there was always something printed in
large letters, which was of chief importance. On one occasion (my father
tells a friend), the object of the journey was the study of " a bit one inch
square, in a single picture."
The preparations for a day in town made by a very sedentary man vvho
sees little of the world around him are usually such as would amuse the
ordinary man of business not a little. Being sometimes allowed to ac
company my father on these great occasions, I well remember the bustle
and circumstance attending them. For days, perhaps weeks, beforehand
1 He wrote, "Burke complained in his day that it was difficult to meet with
" conversation— the discussion of some subject.' The odious ' music,' as it is called, stops
"conversation effectually."

136 THE LIFE OF
a list of things to be seen, done, and got, was carefully compiled upon a
leaf of a small sketch-book, and the route was systematically planned out,
so as to economize time to the utmost. On the eventful morning, the
broadcloth coat with long, flowing skirt was brought forth, and the white
cravat was adjusted with unusual care. One or more sets of underclothing
was donned, according to the time of year, and sometimes indeed a second
pair of trousers in severe weather. The silver spectacles were reluctantly
laid aside for those of thin steel, and a mighty silk hat was # disinterred
from a box where it dwelt secure for months together. What a hat it was !
But for his limbs my father would have been a big man J and I verily
believe that hat (though it fitted him) was the biggest that could be bought.
The label on the bandbox had been directed by the hatter to " The Rev.
S. Palmer " and there was certainly a sort of very venerable curl about
the brim.
Arriving at the station in a flutter of excitement, and not less than half
an hour or so too early, we patrolled together, my father quite unconscious
of the attention that his peculiar dress attracted, or if sometimes made
conscious, not in the least put out. Once fairly in London he devoted
himself to showing me everything of interest that lay in our route, and it
was astonishing how much he knew of the history and the associations of
every nook and corner of older London. Regardless of staring, laughter,
or jostling, he would stop dead in the middle of the pavement, or in a most
conspicuous place, to point out to me some classic spire or memorable
house, or the ancient haunt of one of his heroes. On one occasion he
stopped thus, when he was walking with a young friend, before a milliner's
shop and began, with some vehemence of action, to declaiming his high,
tenor voice against the " Jezebel Tops " within. A few passers-by, scenting
any eccentricity in the usual unerring way, also stopped ; and my father
happening to turn, found his companion fled, and himself the nucleus of a
growing crowd.
He did not confine himself to showing me the ordinary out-door sights ;
for, under his guidance, I saw the interior of many a notable building,
which his descriptions fixed in my memory. As for his purchases, what joy
there was in them, small though they were and few in number ! An old
book, a print or two, a photograph of some favourite picture, or a miniature
antique bust from Brucciani's — these were the things that found their way
into his bag or pockets during the day, and they gave him that keen
pleasure known only to cultured men of small means who grievously pine
for an object for months before they venture to buy it.
I remember particularly, the courtesy of his manner to all with whom
our travels brought us into contact, without any distinction of class,
' He was barely 5ft. 3 inches in height, but was 40 inches round the chest.

SAMUEL PALMER. 1 37
or any nicely-gauged discrimination of relative wealth. In the pursuit ol
the chief object of the day he was tenacious and patient as a bloodhound ;
and so, when we returned home in the evening, and dragged our wean
legs up the steep homeward hills, we were able to reflect that not one single
minute had been wasted.
In some of my father's letters allusions occur (not without pathos), to
an exceptionally drastic annual spring cleaning. This was an event he
used to dread, partly on account of the discomfort attending it, and partly
because the precious contents of the painting-room — books, plaster-casts,
papers, and portfolios, were bundled out upon the lawn, there to be
diligently dusted, and afterwards returned to the shelves in an order
unfamiliar to him. No corner was too sacred to escape the deluge ; no old
folio volume too reverend to escape a banging ; and no treasured store of
odds and ends (for all which he had a use of his own), too well hidden to
defeat a severe, revising scrutiny. To avoid this hygienic but very painful
visitation, my father fled ; and he usually betook himself either to London,
or to "Elysium" as he called it, Mr. Hook's retreat at Churt. In 1869
he writes to Mr. Redgrave : — " Little did I think when Hook walked
" into our Club meeting for the first time (it was at Creswick's), that
" the privilege of his friendship and that of his most excellent wife
" would be such an item in the consolations of my future being ! " And
again he writes in 1870: — "I am so glad that Mrs. Hook has thriven
" upon Norway. She is so discreet, so genial, and so good, that if
" Ecclesiastes was yet to write, Solomon might say, " One of a thousand I
" have found."
My father's sympathies were strongly bucolic. Loving dearly the
breath of cows, the sweet smell of the new furrow, and all the wonders of
the gardener's art besides, he looked forward for weeks together to this visit
to his half artist and half farmer friend. Writing to Mr. Hook he says :—
" Orchards and kitchen-gardens are to me more delightful than whole
" mountains of dahlias, but foul were the mouth that could slander the rose
" or the lily ; or loveliest of all, the woodbine." That he revelled in
the scenery round Churt, his sketch-books, and letters testify. And
returning from this to the prim, densely-peopled neighbourhood of Red
Hill, the " Gothic " villa, and the tin)- garden where every inch was of
value, and every twig on the eastern side had its work to do in shutting
out slate roofs, my father must have felt his heart sink within him. Never
theless, within the sturdy covers of his old books, he knew that he had fairer
estates than even "Silverbeck," to console him.
Such as I have described it, was the quiet tenour of this most uneventful
and almost humdrum life. It was without hurry or the ordinary causes of
excitement ; without the commonest forms of ambition ; and it lacked

r38 THE LIFE OF
altogether those salient points beloved of the biographer. Indeed, unless
the reader can, by some means or other, bring to bear a little sympathy, he
will find it hard to understand that such an existence can be passed
contentedly, by anybody but an avowed anchorite. So uneventful were the
years, that little occurrences which an average man would forget in a few
days were apt to become magnified in my father's mind into adventures,
somewhat to the amusement of his younger friends.
Those vvho crossed the threshold of his room, found themselves centuries
behind the times. In the place of the daily newspaper, or the latest novel,
heavy old folios and quartos lay upon the table. The last scandal or the
newest crime failed to awaken any curiosity ; and although it is true that
the greatest religious or political questions of the day (as reported upon
by his friends) were canvassed, for the most part literature, philosophy,
poetry and art, were the chief topics ; if ancient so much the better ;
and if modern they were approached with interest, but with a prejudice
little disguised.
Certain evenings of the week were set apart for the reception of two
frequent visitors — the sons of an old friend of my father's then living in the
neighbourhood. Naturally fond of young people, my father took to these
boys almost as to children of his own ; and finding their minds and tastes
much above the average, he welcomed their visits, till in time these
became a settled ordinance, interrupted only by school and university
duties. Poems, essays, magazine articles, red-hot schemes for various
sweeping reforms — all were brought and laid before him; but not always
with the anticipated success in securing a straightforward opinion. That
was a matter in which my father was habitually and, as we used' to think,
unnecessarily careful not to commit himself.
Among the many conversations which took place on these occasions, I
cannot remember one which was not interesting. The singular animation,
the infinite number of authorities appealed to, the wide range of subject, the
keen sense of poetry, pathos, and humour which distinguished the trio, were
as noteworthy as the vehemence and ability with which each would defend
a favourite author or pet conviction, when (as was almost invariably the case)
the talk glided into argument. Many of these arguments took the form of a
defence of antiquity — of ancient authors, philosophy, and poetry, from inge
nious but often feigned attacks by the two exponents of more modern
thought. The sympathy of his adversaries was often with my father, but
he courted attack, and knew how to provoke it to some purpose. Thus it
happened that the disputants sometimes waxed more earnest than was
consistent with perfect temper ; as, for instance, when in his turn, he
assaulted modern science, and openly averred that he preferred Aristotle
as an authority on natural history, to the greatest modern naturalistsi

SAMUEL PALMER. i ;,,
A few instances of his convictions on subjects such as this, taken from
his letters, may not be out of place. Thev show an incredulity which
could be pronounced enough when occasion served; a bias which, con
sidering he read little or nothing of the works he repudiated, and often
knew less of those facts and theories which he dismissed in a contemptuous
paragraph or two, amounts to injustice : — [October 20, 1864]: — "The in-
" fluences of the day promise much worse things than paganism, with its
" perverted truths and misapplied devotion. What measure of light was
" permitted, Pagans would not have changed away for the wretched
" debris of rotting skulls and flint arrow-heads. If so-called science bids
" us give up our faith, surely we have a right to ask for something better
*' in exchange."
[February, 1868.] : — " I am lamentably stupid with this severe attack [of
" illness], but not quite so far gone as to part with the LYIIIth of Isaiah
¦" for all the geological, dismal millions of ages, or all the wretched flint
" axe-heads, or all or any cavernous bone-grubbing whatsoever."
[January 2, 1873.] : — " As to the hopeful young gentlemen vvho do us
" the honour to own our parentage, they are precisely as I was once, making
" my way to pay a first visit to an old country house up a very dirty lane
*¦ in a quiet, grey moonlight. Looking on my left I saw what appeared
" to be a perfectly smooth and clean pathway. I leaped out of the mud
" and found myself in a ditch ! What can have maddened them ? When
" did we, in our maddest days, approach the folly of preferring Mr. Darwin's
" ' developments ' to these words : — ' God created man in his own image ' ?
" When did we imagine such debasement — intellectual debasement, as
" would • read that wondrous chapter, the raising of Lazarus, without
"believing it? . . The genus juvenis seems to be marching backwards
" apace, with colours flying and a full band, and this they call
" ADVANCE."
[February 15, 1879.]: — "The learning which is indeed exceptionable, is
¦' that science, falsely so called, which would tortuously pervert the universal
¦" language of God's glorious works into a disproof of his existence."
These passages speak for themselves, and I will therefore leave them
Avithout comment.
It was as evident to my father's auditors as it is easy to see from his
letters, that he was no optimist ; that he thought many of the modern
tendencies were downwards ; and that most of our boasted " progress "
was little better than retrogression towards the universal catastrophe lie
seemed seriously to anticipate. " Have you really seen the last of
•" Margate ? " he writes to Mr. Richmond, " Can't you come down and have
" a social groan over things in general ? " On one occasion, being pressed
very hard to give some one instance of genuine progress in this century,

140 THE LIFE OF
after an " agony of accommodation " he was able to call to mind only
the abolition of intermural interment. He upheld against repeated
attacks what we called his " undulatory theory," thus expressed in
his own words : — " Like everything else it [the theory of the earth's
" motion], has gone see-saw, which those who are at the upper end of the
" plank for a moment call ' progress ' ; whereas the whole history of
" nations, and science, and art, has been see-saw (ill spelt I fear), or, if we
" must have a fine word, ' undulation.' 'n It will be found that he pointed
to many of the discoveries of the present century as evils and national
calamities ; and he believed that, in many other respects, we were merely
on the summit of a wave which would subside, and rise again, and so on
till the fast-approaching day of visitation.
To what extent my father was in earnest, or rather, to what extent he
was secretly convinced as to the truth of some of his statements and
apparent beliefs, as expressed in these conversations and in many of his
letters, I am not prepared to say. I have always suspected that he was
not convinced in all cases, because his mind appeared sufficiently logical
and sufficiently trained — his reading sufficiently wide, to guard him at all
events from so violent and unreasonable a kind of prejudice as that he
occasionally paraded, although he seemed unconscious that he was not the
least prejudiced of men. I am inclined to think that of the many stout
fortresses held from his youth up by his affections against his intellect
(for it must be remembered that he was once, he says, a bit of a
free-thinker), several were undermined by proofs to which he could not
altogether remain blind. Thus, perhaps, it has been in all ages ; and in
proportion to the amount of a man's knowledge and ability, he has been
compelled (often sorely against his will and often secretly) to march sooner
or later with the times in which he has lived. Yet it is impossible to read
many of my father's letters without seeing that, in some notable cases,
prejudice held its own against all comers. A fair idea of the relative
strength of his intellect pure and simple, and of his prejudice, will be
given by the few passages which follow. [August i, 1856.]: — "There is
" an ancient brick house which stands back in the High Street of
" Margate, whence, eighty or ninety years since, my grandmother
" leaped in affright from a first-floor window. Strange to say, it is
" reported that the people who now live there leave it every Saturday
" and inhabit elsewhere. Only think of a restless spirit wandering
" about one house for nearly a century ! "
[April 27, 1862.] : — " No one is less credulous than myself in accepting
" strange narrations of our intercourse with the unseen world— yet,
" independently of anything contained in the Holy Scripture, I think
1 Letter to Mr. C. W. Cope. September, 1872. LXXXIII.

SAMUEL PALMER. 141
" that the occasional experience of men in countries and ages widest
" apart, from the earliest times, making innumerable subtractions, and
" admitting every reasonable doubt, do altogether prove this much, that
" sometimes the spirits of the departed know what is going on among those
" dearest to them on earth ; and if so, we cannot tell but that they always
" know it, although unable to manifest that knowledge. I can find some
" comfort in this."
[October, 1870.]: — "When at Margate with Herbert I had peculiar
" opportunities of collecting evidence as to haunted houses, and spent
" almost the most interesting evening in my life in a family meeting
"(convened for the purpose) of alleged eye-witnesses. My impression
" was that, making all allowance for imposture and mistake, there was
" a residuum of evidence which no candid mind could resist. I think you
" must have some curious information on the subject, and should like to
" talk it over with you."
[December, 1870.] : — "At last cumulative evidence has compelled me to
•' believe that sometimes departed spirits haunt particular places."
[August 29, 1872.] : — " I know . . . certain particulars of five haunted
*' houses, not reckoning that which was pulled down near Turner's house.
" There is still the first-floor window out of which my grandmother leaped
" There is still the mystic canary-bird, or the little toy horse. Who can
" pass a Saturday there ? Not very comfortably, he must confess, Yours
" ever, S. Palmer."
[October, 1873.] : — " Please observe that I am not quite so absurd as to
" doubt of your little press [Mr. Hamerton's], because I have not tried it
" myself. This would be as bad as the hackneyed folly about apparitions :
" 'I will believe when I see one myself; just as if Self's eyes were
" sharper than any one else's I (Pardon the grammar). What a picture !
" Self waiting for his own proper bogy to accredit the testimony of all
" nations and ages."
[September, 1875.] :— " I am inclined to concur in your opinion as to the
" credulity of men of science— i.e. until they come to the proper objects
" of Faith ; then they are all caution and cavil."
[1878.] :—" Without in the least disparaging the other system, I am
" inclined to think that there are cases in which the (globule) homieo
" pathic treatment is quite efficacious. I believe in it, as I believe in the
" fact of their having been some haunted houses, because, if you sift both
" questions till you sift your arms off, there is still a residuum of evidence
" which you cannot get rid of."
[October, 1879.] :— " Ask to see Sir James Thornhill's Allegorical Stair-
" case. ... I never saw it. It was at number 96 [of a London Street] that
" Mrs. Powell for many years made her pipe of wine from the grapes which

142 THE LIFE OF
' ' grew in her garden. I never saw it. What of that ? — Other people saw
" it, and their eyes were as good as mine. There are two sorts of people ;
" those who believe on evidence, and those who, in their omniscience, make
" a list of the impossibles, and believe even on the strongest evidence only
" such things as their expurgatory index has left open."
[March 16, 1880.] : — " Many thanks for telling me The Athenceum ghost
" story. I believe and KNOW that the dead have reappeared, but this
" case seems parallel with one narrated in a subsequent number, a
" phantasm of the brain ; or, to express it in high-class gibberish, an
¦" exceptional phase of psychological subjectivity."
I was present at the family gathering convened at my father's request,
and I remember it well. It consisted chiefly of ladies, all of whom were
such devout believers in the supernatural, that they related in perfect good
faith, and_with as much sangfroid as if they were the incidents of every-day
life the most astounding occurrences. With an eager and boundless credulity
ready made for all emergencies they had, as they believed, been eye-witnesses
of certain events in places already abundantly provided by tradition with an
evil reputation ; and my father, with a credulity in my opinion little
inferior, urged on by a powerful imagination, absorbed what he heard as
" evidence." The truth seems to be that he was never at any time of his
life in the habit of subtracting the large percentage of exaggeration and
inaccuracy, that most people subtract almost unconsciously from what they
tr. His credulity with regard to strange or romantic episodes in natural
history (as, for instance, the capture of a mighty sea serpent at Oban),
to say nothing of a firm conviction of the futility of modern science
generally, which was largely due to wilful ignorance of the evidence ; his
repugnance to taking up any book or to investigating any facts opposed to
his own impetuous and warm beliefs — all this leads to the conclusion that
he was, in his way, not only as biassed as most men, but as incapable of
seeing that he was so. Unless we can believe that a man's mind may be
divided into two sharply defined kingdoms or polities, the one ruled by his
impulses, affections, and imagination, the other by his intellect and
reasoning power ; each kingdom being distinct and sometimes able to act
independently of the other, it is impossible to reconcile all we meet with
in my father's writings and actions.
Quite as much of the amusement of the long series of conversations
with the two young scholars lay in this want of self knowledge, as in the
warmth of his convictions, the coolness of his incredulity, the ingenuity of
his defences, and the vigour of his attacks.
It must not be imagined that if my father was a prejudiced disputant, he
was unfair, impatient, or overbearing. He was an unconscious master of

SAMUEL PALMER. ,+ f
the rare art of drawing people out to show themselves at their best, and after
half an hour's conversation he would often sit passive, while some enthu
siastic friend trotted his favourite hobby to and fro before him. lb
achieved this result partly by the pardonable Jesuitism of agreeing with his
companion as far as agreement was possible without loss of self-respect, and
he mentioned as a type of man to be avoided, an early acquaintance of his
who met every statement made before him with a knowing look and " I
don't know that." In himself there was nothing of this, and he preferred
passing over palpable blunders and inconsistencies, as long as there was no
trespassing within certain boundaries. His companion once within thesi
boundaries, he took up his parable to some purpose. He was a good
listener; and he rarely refused sympathy with an adversary's opinions,
where he could conscientiously give it. This art of listening (for to listen
well is an art), and readiness of concession had something to do with his
popularity with men of widely differing shades of opinion, although such
attributes may sometimes have brought him within a measurable distance ot
the accusation of trimming.
On the other hand, his views, as I have said, sometimes brought down
upon him a series of attacks ; but however well these were marshalled by
logic, or backed by an array of unimpeachable authority, or weighty evidence,
he would rarely admit defeat. Towards the end of some tough discussion,
when his antagonist felt assured of a decisive victory — suddenly, by some
ingenious manoeuvre, some energetic confession of faith, or an abrupt
retreat into the strongholds of paradox (for which, like Blake, he had a
liking), he would show that he valued the arguments, and the evidence, and
the authority, not a snap of his fingers, against his own cherished convic
tions. Thus he often left his opponent with an angry eye and useless
weapons. Very few regular visitors found their way at this time to Furze Hill
House. Of late years my father had made scarcely any new friends,
although the neighbourhood was one where literature and art were said to
flourish under the auspices of Societies which sketched and lead and were
lectured to, after the curious manner of country Societies in general.
From these he held himself instinctively aloof. Since his loss, he had
shunned mixed gatherings, and he had always disliked the formal hospi
talities of etiquette. Thus it was that those who came at all were to some
extent kindred spirits, and among them there were a chosen few vvho were
admitted to my father's study. Thither, when domestic matters threatened
distractions, retreat was made for the most notable readings and conversa
tions. In his reading aloud my father particularly hated interruption, and
asserted that it always came at some important crisis in the story or poem.
Much to his friends' amusement, he invariably (and perhaps a little osten-

i44 THE LIFE OF
tatiously) stopped short, if there was any whispered instruction to a
servant, a tinkling of tea-things, or a rattle in making up the fire.
The study had a very pronounced sentiment of snugness about it ;
being neither too orderly, nor too empty, nor too large. A bow window of
western aspect looked out upon Leith Hill, and the curtained shelves
which lined the opposite wall bore a heavy load of plaster casts from
antique gems and busts, wax models of the figures of designs which were
in progress, many colours, and very many books. Here lay one of the
beautiful smock frocks once worn by so many of the peasantry, there a
relic of Mary Ward — her battered tin ear-trumpet ; and there again,
unstrung and silent, the old violin, once eloquent with many an ancient
air on the banks of the Darent. Some much larger shelves on one side
of the room held, in classified portfolios, the innumerable sketches of
all sizes, all degrees of finish, and in all materials ; a long life's selection
from much of the choicest scenery in England. Five or six box^
portfolios beneath contained the more elaborate studies, British and
Italian. Next to the sketches, a chest of drawers bore upon it a home-made
cupboard. This contained a set of well-used etching-tools with other
etching materials, and a few miniature antique busts in wooden cases or
calico bags. This was the favourite corner of the room, and great was
my father's rejoicing when, one day, the " Etching Cupboard " was evolved
from an old packing-case. Not the least important item among the
contents of the drawers was a tiny box labelled " BRIGHTS." In
this there dwelt, protected from all contamination, and each in a white
paper jacket neatly fitted over the upper part of it, certain cakes of the
colours with which my father worked on the brightest passages in his
drawings. As he sometimes attempted "a focus" which was "a well-head
of dazzling light," and often the very sun himself, such care was well
repaid. Finally, there was one rarely-opened drawer holding a few relics of his
dead children, at which my father dared not look, though perhaps he liked
to have them near him.
Upon the plain, deal easel some disjointed words were chalked, each
being a clue to some truth or maxim which he wished to keep before his
mind. For instance, the single word " PARSLEY " was the most con
spicuous, and referred to an anecdote in Mr. Hamerton's Intellectual Life,
thus related : — " I happened one day to converse with an excellent French
" cook about the delicate art which he professed. . . . Among the dishes
" for which my friend had a deserved reputation, was a certain g&teau
" de foie which had a very exquisite flavour. The principal ingredient,
" not in quantity but in power, was the liver of a fowl ; but there

SAMUEL PALMER. I4S
" were several other ingredients also, and amongst these a leaf or two
" of parsley. He told me that the influence of the parsley was a ^ood
" illustration of his theory about his art. If the parsley were omitted, the
" flavour he aimed at was not produced at all ; but, on the other hand, if
" the quantity of parsley was the least excessive, then the gateau, instead
" of being a delicacy for gourmets, became an uneatable mess."
Next to the easel stood the painting-table, which on examination, re
vealed itself as an old wooden washstand I Now, it creaked under an
unwonted load, consisting of a large rack full of china palettes ; under
brush-cases, mugs, saucers and gallipots ; most of them containing the rich
succulent masses of colour my father delighted to use, mixed with the last
of a long series of vehicles invented successively, since the days of the
notable " egg-mixture."
Many of these materials were, like the furniture, very different from
those usually found in the water-colour painter's studio. Some of the
brushes seemed large enough for fresco, though the series included the
tiniest sables. Throughout the room, till you came to the last of the
rough and heavily-laden bookshelves and a decrepit arm-chair, there was
nothing that was costly or conventional, or even what would be called by
many, " respectable " ; and there was little that did not bear evidence of
our clumsy tinkering.
The simplicity I have described was no longer a matter of necessity,
for my father's circumstances were easier now, his prices higher, and his
commissions constant. Society of course, or rather the small portion of
society's outposts with which we had anything to do, if it had not been
rigorously excluded, would have had the same opinion of his room which
it has held touching such things since the days of Diogenes. I think it
was my father's vehement hatred of pretension and show that took the
concrete form of a study furnished as I have described, and that such a
practical counterblast comforted him not a little. " There are States
where Visionary men are accounted mad men ; " and although some
what appeased by the drawing-room " Fal Lais," I fear there were those
who took the master of the house for a harmless lunatic, living in
highly necessary seclusion. His habit of talking to himself had grown
upon him, and he was wont to discourse audibly with certain imaginary
persons on such subjects as his " weeds," the progress of his work, or the
composition of a design. These persons were addressed, and were
familiarly known as " Mr. Jackson," " Mr. Jinks," and " Mr. Jick ; " and
they seemed to play quite a natural part in our little circle. What the
housemaid and gardener thought of them, history sayeth not.
Sometimes when a friend was dining with us, my father would appear
at the table with a ring upon his little finger, which unwonted ornament he

146 THE LIFE OF
would ostentatiously display. The guest was sure, sooner or later, to notice
not only the ring (it was a plain, substantial-looking hoop), but a markedly
genteel bearing and gesture. But, towards the end of the meal, a dangling
screw would appear where the stone is usually set, thus showing that the
jewel was nothing more than a new and highly lacquered picture-frame
ring. This, the wearer would continue to show off with mincing attitudes,
and " Reigate genteel " conversation. This was of course another practical
counterblast. He was also wont to appear before his more intimate friends
affecting great fragility and decrepitude. When one of them has been
announced, I have often seen him seize a blanket, throw it over his head
and shoulders and with a shawl or two superimposed, totter into the
drawing-room, there to be greeted not by sympathy but by much laughter.
Except in the hottest weather he was rarely to be seen outside his
painting-room without his shawl ; and latterly, when he ventured upon
railway travelling, he was, as he said, " swathed like a mummy."
It was in the cosy but shabby little room I have described, that my
father's most ambitious works were completed, his letters written, and his
literary recreations so ardently pursued. There it was, that, after his day's
work, he lighted his small paraffin lamp J " Nancy " (for to many things he
had given some strange name), and might be found by those privileged to
enter, with his old books piled round the tea-tray. He writes to Miss
Redgrave : — These old books go well with country associations, and I find
" some solace in them ; less, however, than when I read them with poor
" faithful ' Tab ' upon my knee, gently patting the leaves now and then,
" that I might take some notice of her."
Nevertheless, although contented, he still remembered with a natural
regret the resources of London — its libraries, museums, and galleries. He
writes to Miss Redgrave in 1864, "After all your London treats, conceive
" if you can, of the stagnation here. [The loss of] ' Tab ' is the only event
" since we had the pleasure of seeing you, except that the creeping hours
" are the more weary, as each creeps along with a hod of mortar on her
" shoulders to multiply hideous, slate-roofed ' villas ' all over the place.
" But all this comes of living in a GENTEEL RESIDENCE, with a
" BUTLER'S PANTRY in it ! There is no stagnation about a farmhouse.
" All is life there ; change — progressive change ; production. Of course I
" mean an old-fashioned farm ; not those flat Yahoo-sheds they build now
" and call ' model farms ' ! The natural ascent in the scale of beauty
" from the real cottage, is through the farmhouse, the grange, the old
" baronial place, to the cathedral.
" I long to see the first picture that is painted of reaping by steam.
" ' O I ' but they say, ' It's only want of imagination in the artist : it is just
1 Gas he loathed and continually railed against.

SA M UE I PA I ME R. 1 47
" as beautiful : did not Turner paint a train ? ' To which the fit rejoinder
"is 'FIDDLESTICK!'"
Literature was at this time more than ever indispensable to my father's
happiness. In 1839 he wrote to his friend Dr. Williams from Italy, of his
longing to be back again among his books — to have a " Great Read " as of
old. Now, he writes to Mr. Edward Calvert: — "How dirt cheap are
" really good books, when we compare them with the price and intrinsic
" value of everything else we lay out money upon. Why, a suit of clothes
" costs a greenhorn from eight to ten pounds, and a knowing man five or
" six. Think of the gems,1 think of the blessed books we can buy for that
" money ! Any one of which is worth all the toggery we ever put on our
" backs or ever shall, even if we lived to see the next ' revival of art.' " Only
a year before his death, we find him still rejoicing in books, as giving the
cheapest, the best, and the least palling of all secular pleasures. It was
seldom, even now, that he ventured out alone without some pocket volume,
and he had written of this habit to Mr. Gilchrist in 186 1. "... the little
" book which I have carried in my pocket and read as I walked, has
" somewhat cheered the dreadful solitude I feel when walking alone. I,
" who used to love the wildest solitudes — for whom no glens were too
" savage, no woods too dark.''
For more than half a century, my father and his first cousin Mr. Giles
had spent Christmas together. It is difficult to imagine two natures more
completely congenial ; and their minds, from their youth up, seemed
instinctively to follow the same channels. Permanently impressed by my
father's influence early in life, his cousin, during his visits to Shoreham as
one of the "Ancients," acquired an admiration for the same kind of art,
and literature, and music, and for the rich scenery, which he learned to
invest with the same associations. Even many years spent in the prosaic
atmosphere of the Stock Exchange failed to vitiate these early tastes,
which indeed intensified with time; and what my father himself had long
admitted to be immoderate or eccentric in the art and the opinions of the
Shoreham period pleased the other all the more. A relic of a strict, bluff,
old school, Mr. Giles carried with his comely stature a sentiment of warm
hearted geniality appropriate to Christmas. From the time of his arrival
he retreated to the study, where secure from all interruption, the pair con
versed of the old days, deploring modern innovations, and extolling
antiquity. The plethoric " Shoreham Portfolio " was invariably in re
quisition, full of the works of the Shoreham period by my father and one
or two other members of the clique. There was hardly one of these works
that was without its story, or that failed to call up a host of associations which,
1 He means the exquisite little plaster casts from antique gems, of which he had a
collection. L 2

,48 THE LIFE OF
even at second hand, had a charm of their own. To hear those two old
men talking together over that portfolio, was to live the seven years of
secluded happiness over again, to abandon oneself to the same enthusiasms,
to see the same " visions," and to creep with awe or shake with laughter at
the stories and adventures. The portfolio being ended, a little, dusty
colony of Shoreham pictures were reached down from the highest shelf,
and put one by one upon the easel for discussion. Year after year Mr.
Giles's admiration for these pictures seemed to increase, and by degrees,
he possessed himself of some of the best. The purchases usually led to
some refreshing touches being given, for which it was necessary to re-open
the ancient oil-colour box ; and it was evident that the artist was himself
refreshed by the well-remembered smell of copal and spike-lavender,
though it reminded him of disappointed hopes.
Among the very few new friendships formed by my father after his
removal from London, there were two upon which he had especial cause to
congratulate himself. Each of them led to a lengthy and very interesting
correspondence, stimulating his mind and his imagination at a time when
his isolation and failing bodily vigour might have caused the mental atrophy
which threatens those who have no one to whom they can communicate
their best thoughts. The friendships did more for him than this, for the
one led the way to the realization of an old purpose which for years had
seemed far beyond fulfilment ; while the other created a new hope, not
destined to be realized, but beguiling him on an enthusiastic quest which
death alone forced him to abandon.
In the winter Exhibition l of the Old Society held in 1 863, hung a little
drawing by my father called Twilight : the Chapel by the Bridge, and of this
Mr. L. R. Valpy became the purchaser. Courteously suggesting that the
light in the chapel was a little too strong, he asked if the drawing might
be reviewed in that particular — a request which was granted with alacrity.
" I have spent a morning on The Chapel by the Bridge" wrote the painter,
" and not an unpleasant one, as it has made the difference of the last
" few sun-glows which give the fruits their sweetness." These were
words which he would scarcely have been foolish enough to write to an
ordinary art " patron," but he had already discovered that his new
correspondent was not to be considered in that disagreeable light.
Mr. Valpy was a man of a strangely-combined character. A serious
and sensitive devoutness which suggested that of the old Puritans, a busi
ness-like shrewdness and caution worthy of a veteran merchant, and the
astuteness of an experienced equky lawyer — these attributes seemed incon
sistent with an ardent love of art and of poetry. His face — keen, stern, and
1 The Society kindly allowed him to break the rule that sketches and studies only
should be exhibited in the winter collections.

SAMUEL PALMER.

'-I')

dark; his somewhat reluctant smile, and a deep, deliberate diction,
seemed to forbid the associating him with any of the luxuries of life, or (save
in religious matters) with its emotions. Yet he was a man vvho (to use his
own words), "sought refreshment in nature's deepest and highest utterances
as rendered by some of our English artists : " whose mental qualities and
eclectic taste often made the intercourse with those artists as pleasant and as
stimulating to the employed as to the employer. He was a man who could
revel in the tints of a dying bramble-leaf, and vvho could fling his law, and his
caution, and his seriousness behind him, before a beautiful landscape or a
resplendent sunset.
A mutual mental harmony being assured, "sympathy expanded," (as
the lawyer put it), " and acquaintance ripened into friendship." Of this
friendship a great pile of letters is the index and memorial — letters which
reveal, on each side, much of the inmost nature of the writers, their points
of sympathy and of antagonism, their artistic and religious beliefs ; and
their keen enjoyment (each in his own way and degree), of the best poetry,
whether found in nature, in literature, or in art.
It was not long before Mr. Valpy made the very singular request to be
shown anything my father had in hand which specially affected his
" inner sympathies." He received this answer : — " . . . Only three
"days have passed since I did begin the meditation of a subject1
" which, for twenty years, has affected my sympathies with seven-
" fold inwardness ; though now, for the first time, I seem to feel in
" some sort, the power of realizing it." After describing the subject in
the words the reader will find in the letter from which I quote, he
adds : — " I never artistically know, such a sacred and home-felt delight,
" as when endeavouring in all humility, to realize after a sort the imagery
" of Milton."
Many years before this, my father had left London for the purpose of
attempting, in country retirement, a series of designs from L' Allegro and
// Penseroso, but had attempted them vainly.
Here and there in his portfolios I have come across slight sketches
bearing the titles of the two poems, and he had occasionally painted other
Miltonic subjects, and even sold them. For Mr. Valpy, however, was
reserved the giving of the impulse which led to the realization of the old
scheme. Before the preliminaries were settled, he became the possessor
of another drawing or two, each of which led to further correspondence,
and to a freer interchange of ideas which were not always in accordance.
Finding my father ready to listen to suggestions and criticisms, his friend
'This design, like most of the earlier Miltonic sketches, is essentially a figure-subject.
The figures are large, and a mere glimpse of landscape is caught through the lattice. It
was an unfortunate composition ; sure of being, sooner or later, abandoned.

150 THE LIFE OF
sent him letter after letter full of little else, though the suggestions were
always dressed in the utmost courtesy of language. An artist accustomed
to begin his work tentatively, without a thoroughly definite preconceived
design, or without an ideal before him, would probably have become
confused, if not angry or discouraged ; but my father was saved from
this, firstly by his invariable practice of condemning to " seclusion
or the fire " everything he did which was not done as well as he
could do it ; secondly by his invariable refusal to be influenced by any
criticism whatever till he had shaped out his own course. He writes
to Mr. Valpy thus : — " Now, while in this train of thought, I feel that any
" criticism, even yours which I must value, would put me out, or at least
" might do so ; though the very same criticism might be valuable when I
" had got to the end of my own tether." And again "... I would rather
" not show anything just yet, as I am convinced that it is injurious
" to receive the suggestions of another mind before one has satisfied
" one's own. After that, criticism is sometimes invaluable. . ." A third
safeguard (and this point is a very important one, if an artist is to
maintain absolutely his originality), was the vivid intensity of the mental
" vision " that preceded the actual making of the design. Thus my father
writes of one drawing that it was "mentally, though not manually
finished." After much discussion of size, proportion, and price, in which as
usual, and even more than usual, he sacrificed mere pecuniary gain to a
love of his subject, a definite plan was agreed to about April 1865, which
involved the making of eight drawings (each measuring 28 inches by 20)
whose themes were to be found in D Allegro and // Penseroso.
A sudden " impulse " to begin some of the subjects arose after a
deliberate mental review of "the whole, the parts, the relations" ; and, at
last, my father says, some of the designs came to him " unawares." Where
imagination is in equipoise with reason, this is not an unnatural kind of
artistic evolution. After years of pondering, years of unswerving devotion,
rendered nugatory by unpropitious circumstances, those circumstances
change, and the impulse to begin arises together with the wherewithal.
Each useless without the other, together they are potent.
He lost no time in securing after his manner the designs which he
describes as lying photographed just over his eyes, and " packed in their
bone box ready for use " ; and his manner was to hint rather than sketch
them in sepia, or bistre, on detached pieces of drawing-paper or card
board ; each subject measuring 1 1 inches by 8. These hints being intellig
ible only to himself, and perfectly useless even to him if carried any
further at that particular stage, a point naturally arose at the outset, which,
in the case of a less wary or sympathetic employer, would have led to

SAMUEL PALMER. 151
difficulty. However, I believe my father departed from his usual custom,
and allowed Mr. Valpy to see these first indications, being rewarded for the
concession by a very unusual degree of intelligent appreciation ; while the
criticisms made were not hasty, but were the result of considerable
thought. From this time, a very copious correspondence (which treated of many
other topics) kept pace with the progress of the work. There was abundant
criticism, and not a little hypercriticism, while there were even a few
decided collisions of opinion. Point after point was reasoned out between
the two (much to the benefit of the national revenue) with a zest, in those
cases where the translation of the text was involved, of which the few
letters I have been able to choose give a scarcely adequate idea.
Although Mr. Valpy had definite notions of his own as to the render
ing of Milton's imager)-, they were somewhat realistic ; and where they
differed from his friend's, he was compelled to throw the reins upon the
neck of an imagination which he found so unusually strong. Both men
were in earnest, neither disdained to learn from the other, and both had
that reasoning faculty which my father believed to be so essential to the
use of the " best images " by the imagination. Furthermore, the lawyer
even seemed in some degree capable of sharing that clear " inward sight "
which distinguished the artist ; a thing, as the latter remarked, very different
from mere speculation.
The story of the completion of the Milton Series may be partly con
jectured from what I have related of my father's mental and artistic career ;
but not altogether, without a knowledge of some peculiar aspects of the
employer's character. For many reasons, the progress was extremely slow ;
and, as my father says, while he was doubting about the place of a light or
the shape of a shadow, a Church was disestablished, or an Empire over
thrown. A few passages will serve to show the spirit in which he worked, and
partly to account for the fact that the series was some sixteen years or more
in hand :— [November 21, 1867.] :—" While I was touching on the sheep in
" The Lonely Tower, all of a sudden, I don't know why, the whole seemed
" to come as I intended, so I packed it up in a paper and string to make it
" difficult to get at, lest I should spoil it. In this state, a few breathings,
" after we have had a final look at it, will be precious."
[March, 1868.] :— " I find that quiet looks in still seclusion have done and
" are doing so much for the drawings, that it would be to their loss to leave
"home till taking-in day. Only yesterday, I improved one of them
" essentially by just a few touches of delicate grey."
[November, 1870.] :— " I am glad you are so indulgent as to give me a
" little more time, for I think some gossamer films and tendernesses may

152 THE LIFE OF
" be added, which are not always to be done at the proper time, but come
" strangely when one cannot account for it."
Again : — " If once in the doing, caution and fear get ever so little ahead
" of impulse and joy, a work is, I think, in its worst peril, though all four
" are good, each in its time and turn throughout life."
To describe more minutely how my father attempted to reach his
Miltonic ideal, is like endeavouring to describe how a poem was written.
I have often seen one or other of the series on the easel late at night,
lighted simply by the candle he held in his hand, as he stood pondering in
that dim light the suggestions a brighter light would not have given.
Many a time I have seen him pause just as his brush touched the card
board, and then quite unconsciously lay brush and palette aside for hours
together, his eyes remaining fixed upon the drawing.1 Possibly the result of
these hours of thought might be a single touch— perhaps not even that.
In a letter written to Mr. Valpy in 1879, after a misunderstanding in
which he was not to blame, my father sums up his share in the scheme as
follows : — " ... I loved the subjects, and was willing to be a loser in
" all but the higher matters of Art and Friendship. I do not in the least
" complain that I have lost a thousand pounds by them. It was my own
" act and deed. In the same time, I could have made thrice the number
" of telling and effective drawings of the same size, but I considered your
" taste and feeling so much above the ordinary standard that, in order
" fully to satisfy them, I have lavished time without limit or measure, even
" after I myself considered the works complete."
The undertaking was in fact a costly luxury, which, had my father's
circumstances been less easy, he could never have afforded. This is proved
by the fact that, as it was, he found it necessary to keep more remunera
tive work going at the same time, and to work his hardest.
I have generally found it a difficult matter to explain to some persons
who look at his studies and sketches for the first time, what use he
made of them with regard to his finished works. Some suppose (if I have
rightly understood) that he copied portions, or even copied the whole of
some of these studies straight off, adding so much new matter as might be
necessary to completeness ; just as an author might copy an extract verba
tim into his manuscript. I have also found it just as difficult to explain
that such and such a finished drawing which a visitor may have been good
enough to praise was purely imaginative ; and instead of being painted
direct from nature, or copied from sketches bit by bit, was evolved in the
artist's mind.,
Now, in accomplishing the Milton scheme, my father's proceedings with
1 In a letter to a lady artist he writes "When our work is on the easel, I wish we
were obliged to sit a quarter of an hour with our hands tied, to have time for forethought."

SAMUEL PALMER. 153
regard to his sketches and the use he made of them were thoroughly
typical ; so, at the risk of obscurity, I will try to describe what he did.
We learn from his own words in the first place, that each M ilton subject
incorporated something or other of " picked matter ' in his studies from
nature ; and again, that the best of these studies " pressed themselves,"
without his seeking it, " into the service." A thing may be incorporated
in two ways ; either as a brick is incorporated with a wall — a hard, tangible
and visible fact ; or as an essence or elixir is incorporated with any other
fluid, a gas with the atmosphere— also a fact, but not so apparent as the
incorporation of the brick. I can but compare my father's use of his
sketches with the latter illustrations. They " pressed themselves into the
service," and though their essence was absorbed, it was in such a manner
that, perhaps with one exception only, it would be almost impossible, or
at all events very difficult, to find in any of the Milton drawings, a single
portion, however small, which we might recognize as having been copied
from a sketch. Nevertheless, the influence of some of those sketches on
his mind is as clearly evident as the influence of the essence on the other
liquid, or of the gas upon the atmosphere.
One autumn day in 1864, my father betook himself to the glue-pot, and
joined together with a broad strip of canvas two strong mill-boards. Next
day this primitive portfolio had fixed upon it a great label bearing the
letters " MIL." Then he began a thoughtful search through the other
portfolios which lined the room, picking out from the classified divisions,
sketches small and large ; highly finished, or mere pencil indications with
accompanying written memoranda, or tiny effect "blots." Henceforth
this Milton portfolio stood on its especial chair by the easel, and was
carried from room to room. Week after week, month after month, and
indeed, year after year, it was added to little by little, and my father often
became so absorbed in its contents, that night changed to morning before
he went to bed. This study was collateral with the study of the sepia or
bistre designs I have mentioned, and may be likened to the oil which fed
their flame. They dwelt in the Milton portfolio, together with some other
things which appeared to have no relationship whatever to the work, and
indeed to be absolutely incongruous. But these incongruous things were
there because they called to mind certain essential trains of thought, just as
the word " Parsley " on the easel called to mind an all-important maxim ;
and their relationship to the scheme, though not outwardly apparent,
existed in the painter's mind. A few designs (notably those by Mr. Calvert),
found their way into the portfolio as "mind toners," just as my father
pasted into his common-place book, as a curious example of all that he
abhorred, part of a baker's paper bag, whereon was a remarkable poem
called The British Volunteers.

154 THE LIFE OF
A picture may be a transcript from nature outright, a more or less free
or literal translation, a more or less careful compilation of isolated facts.
It may also be as much an original work as a noble poem, and may in like
manner absorb an almost infinite variety and amount of material — mate
rial neither paraded nor misapplied. I think this originality and fulness of
matter may be claimed for the eight Milton drawings, whatever may be
their shortcomings in other respects. Before a single sketch was drafted
into the Milton portfolio, the embryo of each design had quickened, the
ideal had been formed, or (to use my father's simile) the hare had been
caught, what remained being merely the cooking and garniture.
As works of art, these drawings must not be viewed by an ordinary
light. They show us the homely episodes of agricultural life, and even of
English agricultural life ; but this is not all. Their author writes : — " The
" work of a poet ' where more is meant than meets the ear,' would I
" should think suggest picture-work where more is meant than meets the
" eye." It is a haunted stream by which the young poet dreams away the
summer's evening ; and it is a spirit, or some benign sylvan Genius, who
sends the sweet music that gently awakens " II Penseroso."
The relationship between the poetic and the pastoral was a theme my
father loved dearly. We find it mentioned in the introduction to his
Virgil, and in the descriptive lines appended to The Eastern Gate and The
Lonely Tower ; while in the Morning he tries to " unite poetic remoteness
" with such homely reality as the smell of tumed-up earth and the details
" of the farm afford." No doubt it was one reason why he had always
turned with such zest to our older poets, because, in their day, the sad
divorce between romance and rural life was yet to come. Where now all
is machinery and model buildings, the fairy tripped it on the ancient
hearth, or the goblin, mindful of the cream-bowl that awaited him by the
embers, plied his " shadowy flail " with all his strength.
Of " Fact and Phantasm " the author of these designs indubitably
leaned towards Phantasm. His sympathies being naturally in accord
with all that is romantic and poetic, and "sentiment" being, as he
believed, " the end of art," his whole soul was thrown into this Miltonic
work. Early in the progress of the undertaking, he had written to Mr. Valpy
as follows : — " . . . Till all the series are settled upon pretty clearly, I do
" not see how we can well choose the first pair ; nor how, considering the
" uncertainty lurking in the future, and the fragility of life itself, we can
" make sure of the set."
In 1880 he writes : — " I wish in all of the Miltons, not to add a touch
" without a thought : for having given them up to the present moment such
" an amount of time, such a ridiculous amount, some would say (without

SAMUEL PALMER. 155
" reckoning illnesses), I think the best and in fact the least tardy way will
" be to do my very best to the last. Indeed, for several years, this has
" been my inexorable rule with every work, from largest to smallest ; having
" nothing to do with what less elegantly than expressively are called 'pot-
"boilers."' The artist's last allusion to the scheme he had taken so long to carry
out, the reader will find in a letter dated February 16, 1881 ; and after that
it was not long before the enthusiastic artist and the courteous lawyer were
gathered to their fathers.
In the most successful of the few photographic portraits of my father,
he is holding in his hand a small volume which he took to London for
that express purpose. This was a copy of Virgil's Eclogues, with a series
of figures of Virgilian plants; and in 1863, he writes of it to Mr. Edward
Calvert : — "The photograph of that Virgil you so kindly gave, it is but
" fair that you should have, so I enclose it. You can cut it out and
" throw the old man who holds it into the fire. The old man was obliged
" to sit, as it was for a set of the Water-Colour members which Mr. Cundall
" in Bond Street has published ; so he took your Virgil in his hand ; which,
" indeed, is seldom long out of it. ... I have been as a resource in the
" deepest distress of mind, employed for many months in endeavouring to
" sift the Eclogues thoroughly, to the last exactness of meaning and expres-
" sion. With the exception of a few verses, I have now gone through the
" whole ten, and long after the Latin is thoroughly construed there are
" certain difficulties, here and there, which puzzle all commentators."
This poring over Virgil led to an ill-fated project which grew in
time even more engrossing than the Miltons themselves. Long before,
and while my brother was living, the Eclogues had set my father longing to
translate them into English verse, with especial care that the " pastoral
essence " and the immeasurable wealth of imagery and suggestion should
not be " evaporated " into verbiage. And so if the friends who from time
to time paid us an evening visit at Furze Hill had closely examined the
piles of books which lay on my father's table, they would have found among
them one in manuscript — a manuscript so interlined, erased, and cut about
for the insertion of slips of new matter, that but little of the original
remained. He was never to be found by strangers with the volume in his
hand, for a knock at the door was the signal for its being put out of sight.
It was not long before this maiden effort in literature began to be con
nected in the author's mind with the seductions of printer's type. I think
the idea of having his name associated within the covers of a real, published
book, with the work of an immortal poet, betrayed him into unwonted
castle-building. It blinded him to the fact that the work of a tyro alike
in classical scholarship and English versification would not be likely to

156 THE LIFE OF
hold its own against, still less to eclipse, some of the best translations already
extant. He knew, however, that his strong point was the keenest apprecia
tion of that " pastoral essence " he loved so well, and that to him the
poet's imagery was unusually eloquent.
The project was kept a secret from all but myself, but the problem
of the mode of publication proved to be one which my father found himself
quite unable to solve. So in January, 1872, he took Mr. P. G. Hamerton
into his confidence, whom he had known since the publication of Etching
and Etchers, and whom he now knew intimately on the strength of a corre
spondence which had been kept up between them, although they had as yet
never met. The manuscript was accordingly posted to Autun, and was
returned with the wise advice to secure popular toleration, by the addition
of illustrations. My father, like all would-be authors, had anticipated that
his work would stand on its own merits, and we have his authority for
believing that he " loathed the thought of illustrations." But Mr. Hamer-
ton's sagacious remarks as to the form they might take suggested the
possibility of designing some subjects which should be worthy of Virgil, and
which at the same time should secure the circulation of the translation.
So my father braced himself for the struggle.
By the month of May 1872 the verse was practically finished, and the
prose essay which was to precede it was well in hand. The domestic
barometer foretelling the annual spring deluge which so woefully discomfited
him, my father packed up a store of pencils, pens, and Bristol board, and
fled before the scrubbing brush to what might be thought the one place least
suited to contemplation. He had formerly retired into the quietest country
to attempt designs to Milton, but it was in one of the noisiest thoroughfares
in noisy Margate that he applied himself to represent those solitudes where
the Nymphs lamented Daphnis, and that romantic shore to which Galatea
is invited by an Arcadian shepherd.1 If other examples were needed to
show how completely he could dissever his mind at this time of his life,
from the distracting and depressing influences of untoward surroundings,
the works he produced at such a place as genteel Red Hill may be
adduced. Returning home in due course with the ten subjects upon their card
boards, and one or two of them well advanced, my father plunged into
investigations touching photo-mechanical processes. The supposed exist
ence of an ideal process of that kind had betrayed him into trying to use pen
and ink in a manner which was unnatural to him ; that is, by endeavouring to
1 The reader may remember that, years before, some moon-lit cloud behind a row of
Margate Lodging-houses had suggested one of the most peaceful and poetic of his etchings,
and that " The Margate Mottle" was far from being the only effect gathered at that once
picturesque old town.

SAMUEL PALMER.

'57

keep each line and touch separated from its neighbours — an attempt which
his artistic feeling rendered futile. But just as he had once imagined that his
drawings on wood could be faithfully translated, so in 1872, he imagined
that some wonderful process would give him a facsimile of work to which
even the perfected methods of to-day are, by themselves, quite inadequate.
He was soon undeceived by a few experiments, and finding that his best
work was uniformly " processed " into smudge pure and simple, he got, as
he says, like a fly, more and more engulfed in the technical treacle-pot. I
have spared the reader the voluminous correspondence with Mr. Hamerton,
treating of dreary technicalities — of photographic mares' nests, and in
numerable attempts to find among them something on which to build a
theory. In the end, Mr. Hamerton suggested original etching as the most
suitable method of interpretation, perhaps without knowing what meaning
was attached to the word in my father's mind. My father was incapable
by nature and training of doing anything whatever by halves, and he had
throughout the whole of his life been mountaineering among the mental
Alps that were always overtopped by some still more inaccessible peak.
Since he had ceased to " loathe " the thought of illustrations, he had been
haunted by one of his "visions," this time consisting in a small but very
exquisite head-piece to every Eclogue ; and to do these head-pieces, had Blake
been alive, he would have commissioned him, as the solitary competent
person. He had said of these : — " I myself should like to undertake them,
" but it is hopeless. I have no spare brains and even less bodily strength,
" and what I have is taxed to the uttermost." ..." These things, so
" quickly conceived, consume much time ; not so much in putting the
" work, as musing where to put it." His ideal was "poetic compression in
antithesis to landscape diffuseness," with ample time for "dreamy half
hours." The magnitude of the undertaking, therefore, was not to be
gauged by the very small surface to be covered, amounting to only 240
square inches. I think in some respects it would have been better for him
if he had kept firm, and had not attempted at the age of sixty what at the
age of forty would probably have daunted him. The temptation, however,
to resume his favourite employment, and by that means to secure the
publication of his book, proved too great to be resisted. Remembering the
episode of the earwig in the egg-plum, and his battles with mordants that
refused to bite anything but skies, he ordered a dozen little plates of
tremendous solidity, and laid in a stock of the most ferocious nitrous acid
which money would buy.
It must not be supposed that he intended to attempt ten new etchings
under quite the same conditions as those which had ruled the production
of the ten plates representing him at this time ; that number having been
spread over more than twenty years. But a few quotations will serve to

158 THE LIFE OF
show that although his opinions had been somewhat modified, he had not
forgotten the old traditions I tried to explain: — [August- 1, 1871 : to
Mr. Hamerton,] " Were my subjects such as to admit of rapid etching,
" it would be simple enough. But I am not alone in discovering that,
" where tone is aimed at, copper bites into time as greedily as acid into
" copper." [May, 1872 : to Mr. Hamerton] : — "Knowing by old experience what
" time an etching insidiously consumes before I can make the effect ring, I
" doubt whether the etchings of such subjects could be managed under
" from twenty to thirty guineas each according to size. ..."
[fanuary 13, 1879 : to Mr. Hamerton] : — " . . . My etchings consume
¦" very much time, because, though I aim above all things at simple
" arrangements and fewness of masses, yet the progress is analytic, and
" matter aggregates within matter till the copper looks as large as a half-
" length canvas. An artist dares NOT flinch from his own conceptions,
" whether in the first impulse of invention, or its innumerable vibrations,
" widening like the circles when a stone is thrown into the water. Now
" all this is, I believe, the veriest castle-building, and doubtless I shall, if
" writ at all, be * writ in water-colours,' instead of that delightful, durable,
" printer's ink, with a strong touch of brown in it. ..."
He also wrote thus :— " Process 1874 D.V., For etching get first the
" great, leading, pathetic lines, having first obtained the same in the figures.
" Work from the great leading lines, and to them recur. Make friends
" of the white paper." I remember his reiterating that, if he had but
known the value of what he had considered as disasters in his former
plates, and had he been as competent to turn them to account as he was
now, the qualities he had attained only by indefatigable patience, he would
have attained easily, and far more expeditiously.
Once more then, the doors of the little Etching cupboard stood open,
the acid fumed, and needles were diligently sharpened. Colours and
brushes were not "pitched out of window," as he says they should be
in an ideal etching revival ; but the conversation ran on half a hundred
delightful technicalities, and if the angry mordant played him a trick or
two, and bit half through the copper (for reluctance of biting was a
thing now unknown), he rejoiced the more. The " Vs " became a by
word between us ; a portfolio full of the most carefully-selected material
was promoted to a chair of its own ; an old cigar-box was made into a
rack for the ten plates, and his " sole remaining hobby " took the bit
between its teeth to some purpose.
But in spite of all this energy, and enthusiasm, and love, the progress
was slow. There seemed to be an especial fatality against the accom
plishment of that one doubly-cherished scheme. Two other etchings of

SAMUEL PALMER.

'59

a much larger size than the Virgils were completed and published, and
yet the " English Version " remained in manuscript. Why my father,
who was now mentally in the prime of his life, and who, if he loved
anything, loved concentration, should have indulged in this discursive
ness it is hard to say ; but one potent cause of the slow advance was
his extreme fastidiousness. That which had stacked his shelves with
half-completed pictures, plentifully besprinkled his portfolios with water-
colours upon which he had lavished time and study, only to abandon
them, and had turned his manuscript into a paper patchwork, was the
same dire Nemesis which pursued, and still will pursue, the man vvho
would sooner die than put a pinch of incense on the great golden altar
of Mediocrity. A few of the designs that were brought home from Margate, apparently
so well advanced, were abandoned ; and even after they had been etched,
one or two were given up. One only was completed as an etching — the
plate known as Opening the Fold. As for some of the other designs,
" vision " succeeded " vision," till the little V. portfolio grew quite cor
pulent. Just before the series was begun, he had written thus : — " When an artist
" sees at last what he ought to do, and gathers himself up for the effort, I
" believe it is a sign that his days are numbered." He did not realize as
he wrote this, how true it would be in his own case ; and as he neared his
end, his hope of at last turning over the leaves of his book strengthened
rather than diminished. Even on his death-bed he spoke to me hopefully
of the " Vs," but he died leaving the manuscript unprinted, only one plate
completed, and only four of the other designs begun upon the copper.
If I force myself to regard my father's achievements quite impartially,
I am bound to admit that, with the exception of the introductory Essay,
The English Version of the Eclogues is by no means one of his best ; and
those who have read the prose essay and the verse may perhaps regret that
he attempted verse at all,1 or at all events that he hampered himself with
rhyme, but the attractions of the ten-syllable line, with which perhaps his
admiration for the poetry of Pope and Dryden had something to do,
carried the day.
As for the illustrations, they must not be judged too harshly, for the
reasons I have given. By his earlier work on copper, he had established
so high a standard, that even his best subsequent work will not bear com
parison with that standard (except in a few important particulars), still
less any work which was not entirely his own doing. Had he lived,
however, not only to complete, but to ripen the unfinished plates, as he had
1 His early attempts at poetry were far inferior to his contemporary prose.

160 THE LIFE OF SAMUEL PALMER.
ripened the Milton drawings, little by little, and touch by touch — to muse
over them by the hour together in " undivided allegiance," they would
have held their own against all his other work, early or late, for his whole
heart and soul was thrown into the scheme in which he was so lamentably
thwarted.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

For more than fifteen years, my father lived in his retirement at Furze
Hill much as I have shown ; doing everything that was worth doing at all
with a zest and a will and, among the daily tasks, invariably doing the
most disagreeable thing first.
Over the once quiet and pretty neighbourhood, little villas with big
names had multiplied by the hundred ; and genteel mansions, each with a
smaller garden and a more imposing facade than its predecessor, engulfed
field after field. The only old farm near us, to my father's double disgust,
was turned by capital into a hideous " park," all trim roads and iron hur
dles ; so by degrees his sense of solitude and isolation grew upon him, and
his walks became more and more perfunctory till he set himself a certain
beat with a gate-post at the end, which he always made it a point of con
science to touch before hastening homewards.
His sketching expeditions were long since over, and the dear Devon
shire combes he would see no more. But, as his bodily strength decreased,
his mind seemed to grow more vigorous, as was shown by the pithiness of
his correspondence, the alacrity with which he entered into any topic which
touched upon the deeper veins of thought, by his industry, and- by the
unabated fertility of his powers of design. He worked, he asserted, with
more energy than at thirty ; and in 1878 he was able to say : — " ... I do
" daily, before dinner, about four hours' work with my whole mind bent
" upon it, but cannot go on longer at a stretch. Sometimes the train
" of thought is renewed when designing, or what not, in the evening."
His strong but very near sight, like his hearing, had suffered very little
by the approach of age ; and, as of old, he revelled in the delicate pro
cesses of etching, which are a crucial test of good eyes.
Not long after he had resumed his favourite art with so'lmuch vigour,
I persuaded him to set up a press of his own ; and this being done, I was
taught the mysteries of printing etchings by Mr. Goulding — a teacher of
such zeal and efficiency that I was soon able to take all the necessary
proofs. In 1878 my father made up his mind to begin two new plates of a
larger size than any 'he had done hitherto. He says " The etching dream
M

162 THE LIFE OF
" came over me in this way • I am making my working sketches [for the
" Miltons] about a quarter of the size of the drawings, and was surprised
" and not displeased to notice the variety ; the difference of each from all
" the rest. I saw within, a set of highly finished etchings, the size of
" Turner's Liber Studiorum, and as finished as my moonlight with the
" cypresses,1 a set making a book, a compact block of work, which I
" might fain hope might live when I am with the fallen leaves." A
scheme within a scheme, this had little chance of realization, and only two
etchings of the ideal set were ever completed', The Bellman and The
Lonely Tower. The former was published separately, and the other
(ruined by bad printing 2) appeared in the last work of the then languishing
¦ Etching Club. Although these plates were carried on in a far bolder
manner than any of my father's earlier etchings, and undoubtedly possess
certain qualities unknown to those etchings, I think they prove that
smaller work suited him better. Executively The Bellman and The Lonely
Tower cannot be considered equal to The Rising Moon or The
Herdsman. It was about this time that the solitary Virgil ever completed on the
copper was published under the title of Opening the Fold, and no one
suspected that it was " hapless Damon " who leaned against the olive
stem. Having incidentally touched on the question of the size of my father's
etchings, it may not be amiss to mention that, like the question of propor
tion, size was a matter to which he paid the greatest attention. The
dimensions and proportions of his works were rarely determined by any
accidental circumstance, but were most carefully thought out in their
relation to the design, and even in works as large as the Milton Series, a
quarter of an inch more or less, in length or breadth was not a matter to
be settled off hand. It will be found, however, that the artist's natural
bent was rather towards small than large work. He speaks of the marvel
lous "condensing power of art" — a power which enables a painter to
compress within a few square inches, as a poet does within a few lines, a
universe of beauty and suggestion.
Little by little, increasing weakness, and his old enemy, asthma, deprived
my father of his few outdoor pleasures. He could no longer pay an
evening visit to his old friends at Reigate, or join their Christmas gather
ing, or take a day's holiday in London. A.nd now was proven the in
estimable value of his early habits and tastes. At an age when many
1 A British Pastoral or The Rising Moon.
2 My father writes :— " So the dear old Etching Club revives on the 15th. I love it,
"though it has quite smashed me by the way my Lonely Tower has been printed. Full
" directions were sent to the printer, and a model proof, but in vain."

SAMUEL PALMER. „,s
are a burden to themselves and to all around them, wearily halting through
a peevish senility, it could be said, thinking of his cosy quietude," Stone
walls do not a prison make."
When his work was interfered with by illness he " sprang upon his
books " x and was comforted. He had a small table upon which, in very
inclement weather, he could work while he was actually in bed, and he did
this by the hour together, without impatience or loss of energy. How his
constitution, strong as it was, stood the prolonged confinement toone room
and the entire want of exercise, I am at a loss to imagine, yet he rarely
succumbed altogether. His means being now comparatively comfortable
and his tastes unaltered, he had every temptation to relax his labours in
favour of literature, but it was just as he says. His love of work and his
mental energy seemed to increase rather than diminish, and he seemed
quite as incapable of idleness as on an occasion when a doctor had
ordered him to lie on a sofa and do nothing. He tried it for one minute,
" and started up with a howl."
Although, latterly, he could no longer devote the evenings to the severe
mental strain of designing, he actually turned for light amusement to
arithmetic and algebra, carrying about with him a bag of scribbling paper
for the purpose. This was strange, as his want of success in arithmetic was
a joke against him. After an hour or so spent in puzzling over his sums
and problems, he seized his books and read till bed time. A local library
supplied him with the chief reviews and with such standard literature
as his own shelves lacked, but he was still faithful to the intimate com
panions of his youth, a pile of which in their strong, ancient binding
usually lay side by side with his designs, and a new volume of his
common-place book. The few pages of this volume that my father lived
to write are strikingly characteristic, and show great clearness of thought,
without the slightest sign of mental decadence. Nevertheless there are
signs of tremulousness in a handwriting once so singularly firm. It ranges
as it always did from very small to very large, and it is still legibility itself,
but it shows that the end is approaching.
This seems to me to be exactly typical of his later artistic work. The
ideal is the same as before, the sentiment and suggestion the same, and
nearly all those more essential qualities which distinguished the artist in his
prime from others are undiminished, but there is a tremulousness in the
execution, and a diminished power of rendering the colours of nature 2 by
1 He writes, "The true book-lover is all tiger. He tears open his prey, and slakes
his drought with huge draughts from the jugular."
2 It is said that the lens of an aged eye is liable to become yellow. When this
happens in the case of an artist unwonted crudities of colour may, or perhaps must arise
in his work, and notably, crude blues and purples. M 2

1 64 THE LIFE OF
pigments which show that the time is at hand when the brush must be
laid aside.
In the common-place book and in my father's later letters there are
indications of the kind of literature to which he now chiefly turned his
attention. His choice was still varied, still guided not a little by prejudice,
but it is evident how his mind seemed to retire more and more within its
old entrenchments, sheltering there from the modern developments of
theology, science, and philosophy. In these his last days, he seemed to me
more and more instinctively to shun the present, and to nestle in the past.
He longed more earnestly than ever for holiness and wisdom, deploring
more often his own unworthiness, compared to those great and good men
to talk and read of whom he never tired. Although his religious
convictions deepened, he seemed to me to have none of that latent
assurance of salvation which marks some pious people. He found in his
religion consolation and hope ; and this being so, he strove to save others
from the dark sea of doubt and perplexity, not as one assured of his own
safety, but as a seaman reaches out his hand to a drowning man from a
boat that itself lies in peril. Yet his appeals were rare, and though very
earnest they were never in bad taste. The remarkable point about his
religious faith was its unalterable stability. In a very early letter he
says : — " I am a free-thinker in art, in literature, and in music ; but as I
" read of but one way to heaven, and that a narrow one, it is not for me to
" choose which way I will be saved, and make it a pretty speculation or a
" matter of taste ; and run to seek my Saviour in holes and corners. ..."
Fifty years afterwards, he was still plodding onward, as best he might, on
that narrow way ; and in the long interval, none of life's vicissitudes had
been powerful enough to force him from it. He had been tempted by the
ritual and the associations of the Roman Church, and he had been frequently
and vigorously attacked by the fierce proselytizers of dissenting sects,
having very near relatives on each side. The Sadduceeism and fatalism of
the darkest despair had cast a shadow over his path, and he saw even his
own beloved Church of England split up into vindictive factions. Still, he
kept to the narrow path he had chosen so early. As to Rationalism,
Agnosticism, or any other such form of modern religious thought, he put
them impatiently aside (just as he put aside many of the truths of science),
simply as " Infidelity with a fraudulent label."
He was a staunch, earnest Christian, who had never " held his dogma
in solution," had hardly ever paraded his beliefs, and had never arrogated
to himself a spiritual superiority over others, however much he might
detest their views. This immutability of belief throughout a life-time,
in the midst of all the temptations of religious controversy and religious
faction, and all the varieties of heterodoxy and free thought, was partly

SAMUEL PALMER. 165
due to a firm conviction of the personal existence of the Devil, and of the
reality of his subtle attempts to overthrow the Christian by every variety ol
cunningly-contrived temptation. A man who believes in the existence of
imminent peril from a terrific enemy who is close to him in ambush is more
wary than one who merely suspects a far off danger. And one, like my
father, who sees in every religious doubt or perplexity, a direct temptation
by a personal Devil, leading to the utter destruction of body and soul,
becomes habitually watchful.
Companionship in any quest or conviction often increases in a very
marked degree the energy and strength ; and it was my father's lot to
see constantly before him an example of faith, firm as his own, equally
unwavering, and even simpler in its components. It was indeed a faith
as primitive and unquestioning, in its way, as that of the patriarchs.
A devoted wife, indefatigable in her care and solicitously watchful
over his health, my mother was latterly his constant companion. In the
evening she read to him that kind of serious literature in which they both
found edification, such as The Holy War and The Pilgrim's Progress (of
which they probably knew much by heart), and certain sermons whose
orthodoxy comforted them.
Such of his old friends as time had spared retained their affectionate
cordiality, although their age did not often allow them to travel to Red
Hill. One of them wrote to him, " We never meet, we never communi-
" cate and yet, I believe, have such well-grounded trust in one another,
" that if we met to-morrow, old love would revive, and grateful feelings
" all come back again, as if we had never been separated."
As death took, one by one, many of these companions of his youth, and
his own time drew very near, the great hope of my father's later life
increased — the hope of reaching at his journey's end a fair country, where
he would once more have his little daughter's arms about his neck, and
grasp that hand he had touched for the last time at High Ashes Farm.
" If I were quite certain," he wrote, "of rejoining my beloved ones, I
" should chide the slow hours which separated me." Next to the
happiness of this reunion he longed to enjoy, in a far more perfect manner
than this life allowed, a state of spiritual and intellectual light. There,
perhaps, in one of the many mansions of his Father's house, the righteous
man might find not only an eternity of happiness far beyond human
knowledge, but, the power of searching out the unexplored depths of
wisdom and of learning all he had desired on earth, with no more sorrow
or sin to hinder him. There, too, in radiance by the side of which their
earthly lustre was a mere glimmer, might be seen worthies and heroes
of all ages of the world. Such I think was my father's hope, and his idea
of the Christian's future happiness.

166 THE LIFE OF
Old age, inexorable but not unkind, crept upon him by degrees, merci
fully sparing him some of those infirmities so often the portion of the last
days of life. So gradual was the bodily decline, so great his mental
vitality, that we never noticed the long shadows of the Valley of Death
stealing across his path. He might still be seen rapidly sketching a fine
cloud or sunset from the window, or pondering over one of the much-
beloved Virgil designs in the evening. He might even be found, on warm
days, leaning on his " staff," and sorrowfully gazing at the few wild-flowers
that lingered on, pining for his protecting hand. He revelled in his old
prints and Shoreham relics as much as ever, and plunged with all his old
delight into an evening's argument. The folio volumes were yet piled
upon the table, and still the etching-cupboard was kept sedulously in
order. A new pleasure partly took the place of many others, and consisted in
long drives through the prettiest parts of the surrounding neighbourhood,
far beyond the odious villas. My father and mother liked slow travelling,
and in the matter of horses were unanimously nervous to a degree, so the
equal sleepiness of the venerable fly-horse and his driver (both adepts in
the work that is paid by the hour), soothed their prejudices, and allowed
full play for my father's intuitive watchfulness for fine effects and beautiful
lines of country or foliage. So they jogged along the lanes, or crept
up the steep hills on summer afternoons, comparing notes on the
vileness of railways and of modern inventions in general, and on the
pretty country the skirts of which they were able to reach. Their favourite
route lay through Gatton, once notorious as a pocket borough. The
old park lies partly under the great range of chalk downs, and partly
on the top, some seven hundred feet above the sea. Here, as at
Shoreham, ancient yew-trees mark out the Pilgrim's Way, and the fine
timber clothing the sweeps of the down reminded my father of Lulling
stone. It was here in Gatton, and sitting in the fly, that my father made
his last lines from nature, and slight as these are, they show that his hand
had not lost its cunning in tree draughtsmanship.
He entered on his last winter's work with a full share of his usual
energy— a winter which will long be remembered on account of its in
clemency. After the celebrated snow-storm of the 18th of January, 1881,
he was driven to his bed by the cold, and there (clothed in one of the rough
flannel coats beloved of navvies) he continued his work for a time, more
effectively than I should have thought possible. He even carried on
towards their completion the three last-remaining Miltons, The Bellman,
The Prospect, and The Eastern Gate, having also in hand (together with a
few other little drawings) small replicas of The Bellman and The Lonely
Tower. The large Bellman, lacking yet (in my father's opinion) the bloom

SAMUEL PALMER. !67
of finish, was kept back for those last reflective touches which he always
liked to bestow upon his work. These drawings being completed, and
milder weather allowing him to resume his usual habits, he once more flew
upon his Yirgils as a schoolboy goes to his play, and finished in black
and white the design to the 2nd Eclogue — one resembling, and in some
respects superior to The Rising Moon etching. It is an instance of the
ripeness and activity of the artist's mind after the decadence of his
manipulative skill. He then sketched in with redoubled zest the subject
intended for the 10th Eclogue, having abandoned the first attempt. This
was my father's last work. Although carried but a little way, it is full of
suggestiveness, and being in an early stage, there is no appearance of
tremulousness of execution.
The patient struggle to continue his daily work, even when confined to
his bed, may remind us of the episode that had so impressed him fifty-
seven years before — his first interview with Blake.
Soon after the beginning of May, my father (who had been ailing for
some little time) was taken seriously ill, and by the middle of the month
we had given up all hope of his recovery. Only six days before his death
he talked with me cheerfully on many matters ; and apparently not realizing
that his end was near, he even discussed the continuation of the Virgil
scheme, cherished to the last. It was sad to hear him speak so earnestly
and hopefully of the project upon which, off and on, for twenty years he
had lavished his time in vain ; sad to see his eyes brighten with pleasure
as he spoke of the difficulties yet to be overcome. But a " peace that
passeth all understanding " seemed gradually to throw a veil over all earthly
matters, reconciling the gentle spirit to the parting with the now helpless
body. My father bore the last hours of his painful illness with great
patience, regretting the trouble he was giving. He was comforted by
the presence of his old friend and tried companion Mr. Richmond, who
shared the watch by the bed-side, and did much to soothe the dying
friend he had loved so well.
On the morning of the 24th of May my father asked for me, but I
could only guess the meaning of the few words he whispered. This was
our farewell and it was then, as I touched his hand for the last time, that I
thought what he had been to me. Everything in the room (for he died in
his study), had some memory of the hours we had spent together in years
past — of all our little schemes and plots, and of the work he had done so
devotedly. There, just behind him, were some of the ancient books he
had loved in his youth, his plaster casts from the Antique, and his small
models in clay or wax. Close by, in an old cigar-box which I had fitted
with grooves, stood the Virgil plates, a commentary on the futility of human
schemes. When I entered that room next, I found Mr. Richmond reading

168 THE LIFE OF
some prayers by the bedside in a voice broken by sorrow, and I knew that
at last my father had left us.
We chose his grave in one of the quietest parts of Reigate churchyard,
and there we laid him on a warm, showery, spring morning of the very
kind he loved most. Some elm-trees cast upon us his favourite " chequered
shade," and just above us a skylark joyously sang till, as the last words of
the service died away, it dropped silently into the long grass. Who
could have wished a better requiem ?
*****
My father's character, in spite of its simplicity, is an easy one to mis
interpret ; but the reader (if he has followed my story attentively), will
have detected certain traits and peculiarities which, taken together, will
form a clue to that character, and at the same time to the genesis of my
father's art.
His early home training and the seven years' seclusion which followed
it would have ruined many an ordinary man for life, even without the
assistance of the little "independence." The youth, however, whose
remarkable sayings and doings I have detailed, invested his time like his
money, to advantage, succeeded in escaping mediocrity, kept his character
unstained, and made himself respected and beloved by many good men and
true. Nevertheless, after the Shoreham Arcadia had passed away, and with
it those happy, youthful dreams which are never realized, his life became
a struggle; not like the struggle of the average professional man
to acquire wealth and position, but to follow up an ideal which
absolutely barred the way to those universally coveted acquisitions. With
the career of an elder son there grew up one great ambition — the hope of
one superlative reward for all the father had suffered and renounced. Both
were dashed away, and over the futurity which had once more seemed
happy, settled a desolate cloud of weariness and despair. Then, little by
little, the old loves of the shattered mind revived, the old ideals rekindled,
and in the end, the life of this loyal man relapsed into that peacefulness
and happy isolation from incongruous things which distinguished its begin
ning. From the beginning to the end, like the refrain of some song, we
may find recurring that which more perhaps than all else leavened my
father's life— its unaffected piety. At twenty he had written :—" Young as
" I am, I know — I am certain and positive, that God answers the prayers
" of them that believe and hope in His mercy .... and I now tell you, I
" know that my Redeemer liveth." Within a year of his death he wrote
again : — " In the kindly fruits of the earth, in physical and mental
" pleasures, God has given more than sufficient to solace and sustain us,
" while we daily present ourselves living sacrifices to His service, in the
" whole of our moral being, in the bent and intention of our lives."

SAMUEL PALMER. 169
My father was far from being an ascetic, and in some respects he
was an Epicurean, delighting in congenial society, and doubly delight
ing in cosiness. He has indeed been described by one who saw him only
as a guest, as a bon vivant.
A somewhat singular feature in his character was the almost feminine
want of reticence in matters relating to his feelings, griefs, and disappoint
ments ; and things which some men would shrink from discussing with or
confessing to their wives he discussed or confessed in letters to friends.
This effusiveness extended to frequent allusions to his health or physical
infirmity. The peculiarity may be regarded in two ways ; either as a form
of effeminacy, or, I think, more correctly, as the impulsiveness and the
confiding nature of childhood preserved to mature years by the want of
those conditions which, in nearly every individual, extinguish them early
in life. Another peculiarity was the co-existence of what appeared to be a very
remarkable amount of moral courage, with physical timidity ; though each
of these qualities was sometimes absent. In some ways he appeared to
be altogether insensible to ridicule, in others most sensitive. And while
he had been known to meet the advance of a wild cow on the Campagna,
with his wife on his arm, and by dashing his great sketch-book in its face
with a shout, to put the cow to flight, he would make quite a to-do over a
scratch or a little bruise.
Whether his prolonged battles to achieve certain conquests arose from
determined courage or invincible patience, it is difficult to say ; but that
patience of no common order was one of his most prominent attributes, is
evident. For an artist of his knowledge and technical power, he may be said to
have egregiously failed in the battle of life and, in spite of his economy, he
died far from rich. The greater part of his life had been spent in a
struggle against what many would call poverty ; and though his labours
were protracted to the end of his days his reputation is confined within
very narrow limits. Moreover, compared with the achievements of many
of his brother artists, and fellow-members of the Old Society, the list of
his exhibited works shrinks into insignificance. The reasons for this are
too obvious to require recapitulation.
He was one of those who live and die almost without an enemy, and
who leave behind them a name upon which even an enemy would be
unable to detect a stain. Rash as it may seem to say that he was without
uncharitableness, seeing what an universe of vices is involved in that one,
yet I believe such is the truth. His own innocence from youth up
amounted, in some respects, to the simplicity of an old-fashioned child ;
and he seemed to find a real difficulty in believing any evil of others until

170 THE LIFE OF SAMUEL PALMER.
unanswerable evidence forced the knowledge upon him. It may be imagined,
therefore, what an easy prey the race of human falcons found him, and
how he fared in matters of business ; glorying in, rather than deprecating,
any catastrophe or discomfiture which followed some intensely unbusiness
like administration of affairs, if he had been led thereto by his conscience,
or by his religious bias.
He had " a rugged side" to his character, readily evoked by such things
as an act of brutish Vandalism, or the insolence of wealth to poor,
deserving men. He seemed to honour the poor with a genuine respect,
uncontaminated by any secret feeling of superiority or contempt.
In summing up his character it would be impossible to find words
more apt than his own used in describing Blake and Flaxman : —
" He was a man without a mask, his aim single, his path straight-
" forwards, and his wants few. . . . Declining, like Socrates, the common
" objects of ambition, and pitying the scuffle to obtain them, he thought
" that no one could be truly great who had not humbled himself ' even as
" a little child.' He knew that order and proportion are divine principles,
" and of universal application : that, as they, governing the conduct of
" picture or poem, can alone reproduce the unity of the first idea, so, without
" them, the life of a man cannot be consistent or complete, or even a
" single day, perhaps, be employed to the best advantage. He could
" distinguish gold from tinsel, the transient from the enduring ; assigning
" to everything its proportionate value. . . .
" He represented well the dignity of his calling : there was nothing
" mercenary in his diligence, or penurious in his economy, or mean or
" contracted in that simplicity and humility of soul, without which the
" Pathos of Art can never be conceived, nor its most touching results
" accomplished." His soul may be described not only as simple, but as symmetrical ; and
as he himself once said, " a symmetrical soul is a thing very beautiful and
very rare."

THE LETTERS OF
SAMUEL PALMER

1-

Pete Point, Lands End.

Study of Sea, Cornwall.

THE LETTERS OF
SAMUEL P A L M E R
182s
I. To Mr. John Linnell
Shoreham, Kent, December 21st, 1828.
MY DEAR Sir  I have begun to take off a pretty view
of part of the village, and have no doubt but the drawing of choice
portions and aspects of external objects is one of the varieties of
study requisite to build up an artist, who should be a magnet to all
kinds of knowledge ; though, at the same time, I can't help seeing
that the general characteristics of Nature's beauty not only differ
from, but are, in some respects, opposed to those of Imaginative
Art ; and that, even in those scenes and appearances where she is
loveliest, and most universally pleasing.
Nature, with mild reposing breadths of lawn and hill, shadowy
glades and meadows, is sprinkled and showered with a thousand
pretty eyes, and buds, and spires, and blossoms gemm'd with dew,
and is clad in living green. Nor must be forgotten the motley
clouding, the fine meshes, the aerial tissues, that dapple the skies of
spring ; nor the rolling volumes and piled mountains of light ; nor
the purple sunset blazon'd with gold and the translucent amber.
Universal nature wears a lovely gentleness of mild attraction ; but
the leafy lightness, the thousand repetitions of little forms, which
are part of its own genuine perfection (and who would wish them but
what they are?), seem hard to be reconciled with the unwinning
severity, the awfulness, the ponderous globosity of Art,
Milton, by one epithet, draws an oak of the largest girth I ever
saw, "Pine and monumental oak": I have just been trying to
draw a large one in Lullingstone ; but the poet's tree is huger than
any in the park : there, the moss, and rifts, and barky furrows, and
the mouldering grey (tho' that adds majesty to the lord of forests)

174

THE LETTERS OF

)

mostly catch the eye-, before the grasp and grapple of the roots, the
muscular belly and shoulders, the twisted sinews.
Many of the fine pictures of the 13th, 14th, and two following
centuries, which our modern addlepates grin at for Gothic and
barbarous, do seem to me, I confess, much deteriorated by the faces,
though exquisitely drawn, looking like portraits, which many of
them are ; and from the naked form, thwarted with fringes, and belts,
and trappings, being generally neglected or ill expressed, through
a habit of disproportioned attention to secondary things, as the
stuff and texture of draperies &c. ; which ended at last in the
Dutch school ; with this damning difference ; that in the fine old
works the heads are always most elaborated — on the Flemish
canvas, the least finished of any part ; and yielding to the perfected
polish of pots and stew-pans ; a preference most religiously observed
by the cleverest disciples of that style at present. An instance of
this appeared in the last exhibition, where was a painting in which,
against the sky and distance, beautiful, intense, and above the
Dutch perception, there came a woman's head ; hard to tell whether
quite neglected, or laboriously muzzled — the least perfect object in
the piece, with a careful avoidance of all shape, roundness, and out
line. But nature is riot like this. I saw a lovely little rustic child
this evening, which took my fancy so much that I long, with to
morrow's light (God sparing me), to make a humble attempt to
catch some of its graces. If I can at all succeed it will be nothing
Dutch or boorish.
Temporal Creation, whose beauties are in their kind perfect,
and made and adapted by the benevolent Author to please all eyes
and gladden all hearts, seems to differ from images of the mind, as
that beautiful old picture in the last British Gallery (I forget the
name ; it is that I miscalled Garqfalo) differs from the conceptions
of the Sistine Chapel, or the tomb of the Medici : were both called
suddenly into breath, the simple shepherds would, I think, as they ¦
ought, modestly withdraw themselves from the stupendous majesty
of Buonarroti's Night.
So, among our poets, Milton is abstracted and eternal. That
arch-alchemist, let him but touch a history, yea a dogma of the
schools, or a technicality of science, and it becomes poetic gold.
Has an old chronicle told, perhaps marred an action ? Six words
from the blind old man reinvigorate it beyond the living fact ; so

SAMUEL PALMER. 175
that we may say the spectators themselves saw only the wrong
side of the tapestry. If superior spirits could be fancied to enact
a masque of one of the greatest of those events which have
transpired on earth, it would resemble the historical hints and
allusions of our bard. I must be called mad to say it but I do
believe his stanzas will be read in Heaven : and to be yet more
mad — to foam at the mouth, I will declare my conviction that the
St. George of Donatello, the Night of Michelangelo, and The
Last Supper of Da Vinci are as casts and copies, of which, when
their artists had obtained of God to conceive the Idea, an eternal
mould was placed above the tenth sphere, beyond changes and
decay. Terrestrial spring showers blossoms and odours in profusion,
which, at some moments, " Breathe on earth the air of Paradise " :
indeed sometimes, when the spirits are in Heav'n, earth itself, as in
emulation, blooms again into Eden ; rivalling those golden fruits
which the poet of Eden sheds upon his landscape, having stolen
[them] from that country where they grow without peril of frost,
or drought, or blight — " But not in this soil."
Still, the perfection of nature is not the perfection of severest
art : they are two things. The former we may liken to an easy,
charming colloquy of intellectual friends ; the latter is " Imperial
Tragedy." That is graceful humanity ; this is Plato's Vision ;
who, somewhere in untracked regions, primigenous Unity, above
all things holds his head and bears his forehead among the stars,
tremendous to the gods !
If the Night could get up and walk, and were to take a swim to
the white cliffs, and after the fashion of Shakespeare's tragicomic
mixtures, were amusing herself with a huge bit of broken tobacco-
pipe, I think about half a dozen whiffs would blow down the
strongest beech and oak at Windsor, and the pipe-ashes chance to
make a big bonfire of the forest !
General nature is wisely and beneficently adapted to refresh
the senses and soothe the spirits of general observers. We find
hundreds in raptures when they get into the fields, who have not
the least relish for grand art. General nature is simple and lovely ;
but, compared with the loftier vision, it is the shrill music of the
" Little herd grooms, Keeping their beasts in the budded brooms ;
And crowing in pipes made of green corn," to the sound of the

I76 THE LETTERS OF
chant and great organ, pealing through dusky aisles and reverberat
ing in the dome ; or the trombone, and drums, and cymbals of
the banner'd march. Everywhere curious, articulate, perfect and
inimitable of structure, like her own entomology, Nature does yet
leave a space for the soul to climb above her steepest summits.
As, in her own dominion, she swells from the herring to leviathan,
from the hodmandod to the elephant, so, divine Art piles moun
tains on her hills, and continents upon those mountains.
However, creation sometimes pours into the spiritual eye the
radiance of Heaven : the green mountains that glimmer in a
summer gloaming from the dusky yet bloomy east ; the moon
opening her golden eye, or walking in brightness among
innumerable islands of light, not only thrill the optic nerve, but
shed a mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre into the inmost spirits,
and seem the interchanging twilight of that peaceful country,
where there is no sorrow and no night.
After all, I doubt not but there must be the study of this
creation, as well as art and vision ;* tho' I cannot think it other
than the veil of Heaven, through which' her divine features are
dimly smiling ; the setting of the table before the feast ; the
symphony before the tune ; the prologue of the drama ; a dream,
and antepast, and proscenium of eternity. I doubt not, if 1 had
the wisdom to use it rightly (and who can so well instruct me as
yourself ?), it would prove a helpful handmaid and co-mate of art,
tho' dissimilar ; as mercury sympathizes with gold, learning with
genius, and poetry (with reverence to speak it), with religion.
Those glorious round clouds which you paint, I do think inimitably,
are alone an example how the elements of nature may be
transmuted into the pure gold of art. I would give something to
get their style of form into the torso of a figure. And I must do
my taste, if I have taste, the justice to observe that I consider and
have always considered your miniature of Anny, Lizzy, and
Johnny, a perfect, pure piece of imaginative art; and I have a
pleasing hope that its beautiful living models will some day
themselves be poets or intellectual artists. I care not how, or from
what a thing is done, but what it is. Pamegiano's auto-portrait in
the last British Gallery, I can't help thinking not only superior to
his other works that I have seen, which have been rather
composite, but the finest picture of any sort I ever saw : we have

SAMUEL PALMER.

'77

only the copy of Leonardo's, tho' I don't know what can go
much beyond that.
I beg to be understood as not so much positively asserting any
thing in this half-studied scribble on a very difficult subject which
is beyond me, as, for the increase of my knowledge, putting forth
a thesis by way of query, that where it is rotten it may be battcr'd,
thus avoiding to choke the throat of every sentence with " /
humbly conceive — / submit with defen.inr." which had made these
lines, if possible, more tedious than you will find them. I will not
correct them, lest I overspend that time in talking which should
find me doing. . . .
Mr. Richmond, in a letter from Calais, asks me very anxiously
about your health. He heard from his father that you were worse.
He says from enquiry, two might go to Rome and stay six
months, for ninety pounds between them. Is this credible ? I
should like to hunt out some gems like the St. George, if I
could go, and bring them home on grey paper, especially such
works as we have no good engravings of. If, at any time, you
feel the cacoethes scribendi come upon you, I wish you would favour
me with your opinion how, should I go Romewards, my time might
be most profitably spent there. I have no prospect of travelling
yet ; but some time or other, God willing, most certainly shall, and
wish to get together all kinds of information on the subject. . . .
With love to the little "Ancients," I remain, dear Sir, Your
oblig'd affectionate Servant, Samuel Palmer.
P. S. I have just finished another attempt at a portrait on
grey board in colours. I took pains, and it is a likeness, but
whether tolerably executed or not, I cannot tell. I am desperately!
resolved to try what can be got by drawing from nature. I think;
the pictures at our exhibitions seem almost as unlike nature as!1
they are unlike fine art. I am going also to try a little child's head : \
if anything would please me in the copying it is children's heads.
1829
II. To Mr. John Linnell.
Shoreham, Kent, Saturday May [ij], 1829.
MY DEAR SIR. Pray accept my thanks for the trouble you
havejtaken in getting me the colours : they arrived quite safely. I

178 THE LE TTERS OF
have not been to town since you saw me ; but in a few days, when
I have finished a bothering little job of a likeness, shall come and
have a look at the exhibition, and I hope, have the pleasure of
your company back to Shoreham. Nothing but such pleasure has
been wanting to perfect my delight at the glory of the season.
Tho' living in the country, I really did not think there were those
splendours in visible creation which I have lately seen.
The ways of the Royal Academy are to me unaccountable — not
that it is unaccountable they should reject six of my drawings ; but
that they should hang those two which I thought far least likely.
I expected they would reject the " Wholg kettle and boiling',' as
they have for these two years, and intended, with the patience of
an ox, to prepare eight colour'd pictures for their rejection next
season ; and if they were refused, a like dose on the year succeeding.
As they condescended to receive any, I wonder they did not prefer
the nature sketches, and perhaps the two little moonshines, in which,
I think, there was more look of light than I have got before ; and
less of my wonted outrageousness than in the Ruth or Deluge. 1
I will immediately enquire about horses and asses. There are
plenty of brutes in Shoreham, but no asses that I know of, except
myself, and / don't answer the description, for I cannot say that I
am yet able to draw, tho' certainly most willing.
The artists have at last an opportunity of wearing the beard
unmolested ; I understand from the papers that it is become the
height of the fashion ! I hope they will avail of this. . . .
With best respects to Mrs. Linnell, and love to the children, I
remain, dear Sir, Your obliged and affectionate Servant,
Samuel Palmer.

1832
III. To Mr. George Richmond.
Friday, September 21, 1832.
My dear Sir. Pray do not fail if you see Mr. Knyvett, to tell
him how sincerely and exceedingly I am obliged to him for his
kind remembrance of me.
I will be in town on Monday or Tuesday at farthest, and in the
meantime, if there is a desire to see some things of mine, my father
[' The two accepted designs. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 179
will be so kind as to get my blacks, which were in the exhibition,
conveyed to Miss Lawkins'.
I have been working very hard at art, which I now love more
than ever, and recreating myself with good books, Sir Thomas
Browne's Christian Morals, and the life of holy Bishop Fisher ; of
which the first is a little casket of wisdom, and the second a most
comfortable and blessed cordial in this cold, heartless, and godless
age. I mean to get the print of the venerable Fisher, and one of
his friend and fellow-martyr Sir Thomas More, and hang them
cheek by jowl in my little chapel, that they may frown vice, levity,
and infidelity out of my house and out of my heart.
I have greatly desired to see your little daughter, and indeed
have already loved her though unseen ; and while so many children,
innocent and beautiful at first, lose daily as they grow up the
similitude of their divine parentage, and become weeds and thistles
instead of olive-branches in the church ; what if, by the hearty
prayers of her parents and friends, your child should be like St.
John the Baptist, filled with the Holy Ghost even from her mother's
womb ; and like Samuel the prophet, minister while yet very young,
in the temple of the Lord ? Yet, such glorious things can earnest
prayer accomplish ! Nothing is beyond its power.
How is the situation of a Christian changed in becoming a
parent ! An immortal soul placed under his control and guidance
for eternity ; and that at his immediate responsibility ! All sanc
timonious whining and canting apart, it really is a most awful
thing ; and so indeed is everything influencing the salvation or
damnation of a soul. It has now, I know, become quite unfashion
able and unbearable to talk of Hell even in the pulpit, but none
will fully enjoy the comfort and peace who do not know also the
terrors of the Lord, the plague of their own heart, and the deadly
evil of sin. If people knew how deeply the whole world lieth in
wickedness, and how totally it is estranged and set in opposition
against God, they would, I cannot help thinking, no longer wonder
why all kinds of sects and schisms may not equally be termed
the churches of Christ ; and think the robe of the true Church
too mean and narrow, without tacking upon it the abominable
vestments of Quakerism, Socinianism — yea the church of Mahomet,
to swell it to the dimensions of modern charity ; but would gladly
press into the sanctuary of the Apostolic Church for refuge from
N 2

180 THE LETTERS OF
the wrath of God, and lay fast hold of the horns of her altars. Once
I was full of this lightness and folly ; yea, even to the present time,
my old Adam can see no reason why the sleek and sober Quaker,
¦or the meek and moral Unitarian, should be beholden to the Church,
claiming the power of the kingdom of Heaven. But blessed be
God, I am changed ever since you saw me. I am a free-thinker in
art, in literature, in music, in poetry ; — but, as I read of but one
way to Heaven and that a narrow one, it is not for me to choose
which way I will be saved, and make it a pretty speculation or
matter of taste ; and run to seek my Saviour in holes and corners :
but to go at once where He is ever to be found, at the Apostolic
altar of the Melchizedekian priesthood. Elsewhere, whatever the
uncovenanted mercies of God may be, we have no ratified charter,
no sealed covenant of salvation. ... I remain in great haste,
dear Sir, Yours most affectionately, S. Palmer.

1834
IV. To Mr. George Richmond.
Shoreham, Kent, October 14, 1834.
My dear Sir. As you are now become a great man, I will
address you on a sheet of my best writing-paper ; not gilt-edged
and delicate like yours, but rather too extravagant for me, who
may perhaps be composing a set of King's Bench bucolics in the
winter months. ... I have no club or artist's Trade's Union to
fall back upqn ; and should therefore be much obliged if, as you
kindly promised, you would let the little mezzotint flock x hang up
somewhere where it can be seen, as it might be of some service to
Sherman or myself, who are both at present pinched by a most
•^ nnpoetical and unpastoral kind of poverty. I seldom taste animal
food, and know when I do that I am exceeding my year's supply ;
so that, tho' sweet in the mouth, it turns sour on the conscience ;
and therefore I prefer bread and butter and apples, washed down
with a draught of my only luxury, weak green tea, which is about
as cheap as bad table-beer. . . Don't think I'm writing when I
ought to be painting. I'm just come from work after dark, and
have cleaned my palette eke. with scrupulosity, and just scribble a
['This was an engraving in mezzotint by W. Sherman (one of " The Ancients ") from
a small picture by my father of a Miltonic subject. Impressions are very scarce.— Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 181
little while the tea is drawing. I am in solitude and poverty, but
very fat and well, and if I could but get a twenty-guinea com
mission, even if it were to take a view of Mr. Stratton's conventicle,
or to draw the anatomy of a pair of stays, should be as happy as
the day is long ; and [I] feel a kind of presentiment (I hope not a
false one), that Providence will not suffer mc to come into em
barrassment. I have a slowly but steadily increasing conviction that the
religion of Jesus Christ is perfectly divine ; but it certainly was not
only intended to be enthroned in the understanding, but enshrined
in the heart ; for the personal love of Christ is its beginning and
end. . . .
I feel for parents, but I feel still more for poor little children
who, whether from the darkness or most cruel neglect of their natural
guardians who do believe, are kept from the nurture and admoni
tion of the Lord ; and are brought into the world .... that they
may perish body and soul for ever. How fearful is the responsibility
of parents, how urgent their call to set their children from their
tenderest years an example of almost sinless perfection ; and that
not negatively, but by a positive and visible devotion of the whole
household to God — by openly delighting in Him ; by the serious
ness of penitence and prayer ; by the merriment of hymns and
spiritual songs, with which they should be waked and lulled to
sleep : and we have the blessed assurance and promise that a
child brought up in the way he should go will not depart from it
when old ! But I am afraid that Way is nothing short of the
devotional and openly holy life exhibited to their children by^
apostles and patriarchs, and in later times, by a few such devoted
and affectionate parents as Sir Thomas More, whose house was as
much a church as an academy of sublime wisdom and heroic
virtue. I feel more energetic and ambitious for excellence in art than
ever ; but yet, I hope, with a more innocent and less selfish
enthusiasm. Our purest and best motives are sadly debased with
every kind of alloy ; but really a handsome income and personal
influence do enable a man by his savings and his authority in
society, to do a very great deal for those two great interests which
ought ever to be nearest our hearts, the poor and the Church of
Christ. Even base money will enable a man while sitting in his

182 THE LETTERS OF
study at his daily duties, to be at that very moment spreading the
light of the Gospel into the most distant lands. I do not think
(tho' I am very likely quite wrong), that Christianity is meant to
damp the spirit of enterprise or the desire of success ; but
certainly, entirely, utterly, to change its ultimate object from vile
all-absorbing self, to the Poor, to the Church, to the welfare — the
eternal welfare of all around us ; to the promotion of the Kingdom
of God, to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. And though the
selfishness of ambition, that " last infirmity of noble mind," may
linger for a good while after nobler things have entered the heart,
yet it will soon, I should hope, be absorbed like the damps of
morning into the beams of the rising sun. But it is a very trying
situation in which I am at present placed — wishing as soon as
possible to struggle up into repute. I have not the money nor the
influence to do good with, and I am in danger of having all my
thoughts and affections absorbed into the means. But I shall
endeavour to use rational means, and I do not think I shall, if I
send any pictures to the next exhibition smaller than kitcats and
three-quarters. I hope I have already the materials for one kitcat,
and two, perhaps three, three-quarters ; and, if I can but get time
before the rain sets in, I hope to have two more kitcats. Where the
frames are to come from I know not. I must try to hire them for
the exhibition.
I have heard there is in one of the late Quarterlies a very
interesting article on Coleridge : it was, I think, before his
death. . . . Samuel Palmer.

V. To Mr. George Richmond.
Shoreham Kent, Thursday, 16th October, 1834.
My DEAR Sir. ... I received your kind and welcome letter
the next morning after I had scribbled the foregoing, and though
I believe our old friendship can subsist very long without fresh
nourishment, yet you afforded it a very pleasant and nutritive
meal ; and I took it the kinder as you sent it to me from the
abodes of the great, among so many alluring and attractive
objects, where the simple and the poor are very apt to be forgotten
or despised. . . .

SAMUEL P A LME R. 1 83
With respect to the studious lamp, it is just what I wish, and
hoping to be much more beforehand than usual with my exhibi
tion subjects I shall be able to clean up the palette by dark, and
devote, if I live, the winter evenings to the figure. I should like to
tackle one or two very fine hands and feet, and to dissect an arm ;
first finishing the old bust, if ever we can manage to get it quite in
the right height and position again.
I thirst vehemently for your legend of the Rhine, and hope to
hear it elaborately wire-drawn over six large bowls of Hyson,
which I am glad to hear you have not learned to despise as I
feared. Mr. Calvert told me something about the skies there
which has set me all agape. If you were only to put down in your
memorandum-book the names of places at which you arrived each
day, before you forget them, it might help to keep in mind some of
the minutiae which may perhaps slip the memory, and I should
like to hear an eight hours' description at least. I would not have
been without the Devonshire reminiscences on any account. I
hardly ever try to invent landscape without thinking of them.
You may go for five shillings now by the steam-boat to
Plymouth, close to the cluster of little rivers that fall from Dart
moor, and see the wonderful Titian &c. — not as a deck passenger,
as I heard before, but lie on a sofa in the cabin, and vomit quite
genteelly. I long to see some first-rate distances, and hope you have
brought a line or two of some of the quaint, rocky, or wooded
summits of the Rhine. I believe in my very heart (but the heart's
a great liar tho' it's the truest part about us), that all the very
finest original pictures, and the topping things in nature, have a
certain quaintness by which they partly affect us ; not the quaint-
ness of bungling — the queer doing of a common thought, but a
curiousness in their beauty, a salt on their tails, by which the
imagination catches hold on them, while the sublime eagles and
big birds of the French Academy fly up far beyond the sphere of
our affections. One of the very deepest sayings I have met with
in Lord Bacon seems to me to be, " There is no excellent beauty
that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." The Sleeping
Mercury in the British Museum has this hard-to-be-defined but
most delicious quality to perfection. So have the best antique
gems, and bas-reliefs, and statues ; so have not the Elgin marbles,

1 84 THE LETTERS OF
graceful as they are : but it is continually flashing out in nature ;
and in nothing more than in the beamings of beautiful counte
nances. But I begin now to be quite humbled, and to speak of all
things as modestly as an impudent man can speak. Every day
convinces me, with wise and good Dr. Johnson, that this life is a
state in which " much is to be done and little to be known ; " and
what is known is apprehended by doing ; and whatever is done
is wrung out of idle, fallen, wretched man by necessity, immediate
and foreseen ; and what is done at leisure is done wrong, and what
ever is done best is done when there is hardly time given to do it in.
Talk of putting thistles under donkeys' tails to make them go f
Why man — imperial Man, unless he sits upon thorns will sit still
for ever. Dr. Johnson would scarce have written anything if he
had not been hard driven by want ; and as to Milton, he had plenty
of other business which he was obliged to attend to, and most
likely came to poetry as a relaxation : and as to artists who paint
to please themselves, perhaps they would get through ten times as
much work and improve thirty-fold if they were forced to sit half
the day behind a desk in the Custom-house. Happy the artist
who has half his time bespoken in commissions, and half to paint
what he loves.
I intend, if I live, to keep the lower Port Royal cell neat all the
winter, and work upstairs, and perhaps knock down the partition,
and carefully exclude every inch of prospect from the window, as I
purpose never again to see London by daylight when I can help it,
though I would gladly visit the great national dust-hole once more
if it were only to enjoy the grand Rhenish tea-festival  I
remain, my dear Sir, Yours most affectionately, S. Palmer.

VI. To Mr. and Mrs. George Richmond.
Near Bettws-y-Coed, North Wales, [cir. 1835].
My dear Mr. and Mrs. Richmond. It is midnight, when
the traveller's heart turns to those he loves. All is solitude and
utter stillness, except the fall of a mountain stream and the tick
ing of a clock : and when there is much more noise than this, the
heart seldom plays its full music. Mine you will call a cracked
fiddle, not having heard from me yet ; but a real Cremona it is still,

SAMUE I. PA L ME R. 185
I assure you, in matters of love and friendship; though my poor
mind, in the process of eccentricity-cleaning, nature may perhaps
serve as the housemaid did her master's violin one morning — scrub
off the tone of centuries. My sufferings are like those of the
"Friends", " Considerable". I am walked and scorched to death,
and have then to make living pictures of dead nature .... I must
be up betimes in the morning, and so wish you good-night.
Evening the Second. I have just received a letter which has put
me into good spirits. O ! what gracious people you married ones
ought to be ! Youthful passions at rest — mutual good example
and most sage counsel ; participation in prosperity, sympathy in
adversity, and sugared-sweet tempers. And then the ''dear
pledges " ! — " Good night, dear Papa." " Good night, dear Mama ",
just before they cuff and scratch the nursery-maid all the way up
stairs, and kick over the basin as she washes them. — " Speak ! Ye
whom the sudden tear surprises oft."
As Mr. Calvert and I walked in a romantic dell, we saw a very
young Welsh girl of more than ordinary beauty and loveliness of ex
pression. The features were softened with that delicate shade of
pensiveness &c. &c. She timidly approached, and offered (I think
for sale), a large, winged beetle, not yet impaled on a pin, but girt
with packthread. It was taken from her and let fly, to her utter
astonishment. O ! for a safe passage to that world where undivorced
beauty shall ever be the index and form of goodness ! O ! for a
heart with none of the girl and beetle in it ! We went astray from
the cradle speaking lies. We killed flies at Church, and came home
telling where the text was. See the worst of your children as they
grow up : be yourselves, not the censors, but the caterers of their
pleasures : while their pleasure is to romp, romp with them : hear
their loudest and their worst, and whip them only for vice and dis
obedience. But don't think them saints because they lisp little
hymns while they are cutting their first teeth. I am delighted when
I think of your children (who I hope will, one day, be dear friends
of mine), to know that both of you have the good sense to despise
the maudlin, twaddling sentimentality — the Radical-French-Rcvolu-
tion philanthropy — the super-Bible religion — the vviser-than-
Solomon sagacity which would disuse the rod. I agree with you
that frequent beating is barbarous and unnecessary, and ought to
be bestowed on the parents themselves who have managed clumsily

1 86 THE LETTERS OF
enough to find it needful : but depend upon it, fear of one kind or
another, as well as hope, is necessary to move adults as well as
babes to effective goodness and virtue. We go fast with sunshine
before us, and a thunder-cloud behind. I believe the dread 01
ultimate bodily correction is the only real bugbear to children ;
while, on the other hand, thousand are the pleasures and holidays
which may be made for them — nay half their learning may, by great
skill, be given them in sugar 
Evening the Third. I hope you have secured the proposed
Saturday for favourite studies. I think it would improve your
health and spirits, beside the intellectual solace and profit. How
many blessings does the future promise ! How do the present and
the future belie it ! How beautifully and usefully may the hours
of the day be parcelled out in a moderate and sober plan of life !
But an allowance must be made for accidents and ugly etceteras.
However, if the leading points of a good scheme be generally
secured it will be more than one in a thousand is able to accom
plish ; so few have any plan at all, or see the one, two, or three leading
advantages which are worth securing at almost any cost. How
does all animate and inanimate creation — all the range of high arts
and exquisite sciences proclaim the immortality of the soul, by
exciting, as they were intended to excite, large longings after
wisdom and blessedness, which three-score years, or three hundred
years would be too short to realize. We are like the chrysalis,
asleep, and dreaming of its wings. The simplest division of our
time seems to me to be into a portion first for religion, and its fruit,
active benevolence ; secondly for business ; thirdly for bodily
exercise ; and lastly, for soothing, intellectual recreation. It would
be well if Christians in easy circumstances divided the poor of the
neighbourhood among them, and each had a little circle of sick and
indigent to visit by turns, say one every day. This might be done
in an hour, and would secure the arrangement for bodily exercise.
There are visiting societies, I believe, belonging to some of our
Churches, which enter into the lowest haunts of wretchedness.
Combination will do very much at the expense of very little in
dividual labour. I am inclined to think that the happiest hours of
many people are those in which they work at their calling ; and if
recreation itself were something both useful and necessary, and not a
mere hulling about and kicking of one's shins, it would be much

SAMUEL PALMER. 187
more effectual relaxation than it usually is. I should think the
amusements of Sir Thomas More and his family were, besides
bodily exercise, little other than changes from the severe to the
elegant studies. O ! blessed biography, which has embalmed a few
of the graces of so many great and good people ! Perhaps, to those
who are in earnest for improvement, no literature is so useful.
Principle and precepts are the grammar of morality ; example is
its eloquence. Though I have often talked of the importance of quiet,
intellectual evenings to those who are fagged in the day, and
though I think them a delicious and never-cloying luxury, yet I do
not mean that we should make pleasure of any sort the aim of life ;
on the contrary, as every little self-denial and agonizing brings
after it a " sacred and home felt delight," so, on the large scale,
our whole earthly existence ought to be a short agony to secure
eternal blessedness. But as, in a long and sultry walk, we choose
out shady places now and then to sit down in, so, I think,
none will agonize so effectually as those who take the
mental bath and balsam of a little daily leisure. Blessed
thoughts and visions haunt the stillness and twilight of the soul ;
and one of the great arts of life is the manufacturing of this
stillness. The middle station of life, where more is demanded
to be done than there are hands enough quietly to do, almost
forbids it ; and the rooms of our houses are so crowded together that
we less enjoy life than hear the noise of its machinery : it is like
living in a great mill where no one can hear himself speak ; so I
think the fewer wheels the better : but what matters what I think,
who am thought mad upon these subjects ? Mad I mean to be, till
I get more light ; and wherever I find it, will turn to it like the
sun-flower : for obstinate though I may have been in trifles (much to
my shame), I am not stubborn in greater things, but like a little
child crying for food, for which I expect kicks and buffets. How
ever, I am prepared : and with a body and mind pretty well
adapted, so far as that is concerned, to get through life with — oil
outside and adamant within, but I hope less and less oil of vitriol
every day of my life.
I have not seen a paper, but suppose things are going on as they
have been for some time ; occasional reform of real abuses, accom
panied (as good and evil always tangle together in this world),

188 THE LETTERS OF
with a gradual demolition of institutions which Englishmen ought
to hold sacred. Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics have broken
down the walls of bigotry, and I suppose will soon be throwing the
stones at each other. In the meantime, as long as the still, small
voice of friendship can be heard, believe me, dear Mr. and Mrs.
Richmond, Ever your affectionate friend, Samuel Palmer.

VII. To Mr. George Richmond.
Tintern, Very deep Twilight. Wednesday, August 19, 1835.
The address for letter is to us, at Mr. William Hiscock's
Black Lion. Tintern Abbey. Monmouthshire.
My DEAR Sir. Our Ossian sublimities- are ended, and with a
little more of Macpherson's mist and vapour, we should have had
much more successful sketching ; but unfortunately, when we were
near Snowdon, we had white, light days, on which we could count
the stubbs and stones some miles off. We had just a glimpse or
two one day, through the chasm of stormy cloud, which was
sublime : however we have this evening got into a nook for which I
would give all the Welsh mountains, grand as they are ; and if you
and Mrs. Richmond could but spare a week, you might see Tintern
and be back again. The Bristol stages start daily — the fare I
believe is low, and there is a steamboat daily thence (only three
hours' passage), to Chepstow, within six miles, I think, of the Abbey
— and such an Abbey ! the highest Gothic ; trellised with ivy, and
rising from a wilderness of orchards, and set like a gem amongst
the folding of woody hills. Hard by, I saw a man this evening,
literally sitting under his own fig-tree, whose broad leaves, mixed
with the hollyhocks and other rustic garden flowers, embower'd his
porch. Do pray come. We have a lodging with very nice people
under the walls, and three centuries ago might have been lulled
with Gregorian Vespers, and waked by the Complin to sleep again
more sweetly : but the murderer of More and Fisher has reduced
it to the silence of a Friends' meeting-house. Mr. Walter was
shown the inside, and says it is superb. After my pastoral has had
a month's stretching into epic, I feel here a most grateful
relaxation, and am become, once more, a pure, quaint, crinkle-
crankle Goth. If you are a Goth come hither : if you're a pure

•4

...¦'

" m

SAMUEL PALMER. i,S9
Greek, take a cab and make a sketch of St. Paul's, Covcnt Garden,
before breakfast. Addison speaks of the Cathedral of Sienna (one
of the richest in the world), as the work of barbarians — clever
savages almost. What a " Spectator " ! He could not bear too lofty
and pointed a style : pity he died before the era of Doric watch-
houses, Ionic turnpike-gates, and Corinthian gin-shops! His taste-
outran his age — ours hobbles after.
Thursday evening. Poetic vapours have subsided, and the sad
realities of life blot the field of vision : the burden of the theme is
a heavy one. I have not cash enough to carry me to London.
0 ! miserable poverty ! How it wipes off the bloom from everything
around me. Had I conceived how much it would have cost, I
would as soon have started for the United States as Wales : but I
have worked hard, seen grand novelties, and enlarged the materials
of imagination. If I could but sell a picture, or clean another
Opie or two, or — but I am all in the dumps, " shut up and cannot
come forth," and feel as if I alone, of all mankind, were fated to
get no bread by the sweat of my brow — to " toil in the fire for very
vanity." If you've a mangy cat to drown, christen it "Palmer."
If you could oblige me with the further loan of three pounds, my
father will repay you I daresay, if you can call at Grove Street, but I
shall soon be in Town myself, only — I want enough both to bring me
home, and to enable me to stay a little longer, in case I should find
subjects which it would be short-sighted policy not to secure.
But I hope not to spend so much. If the Movement Party want a
professor of drawing in the Marylebone Charity schools, pray
canvas for me. Things are come to a crisis now, and I must begin
to earn money immediately, or get embarrassed : horrid prospect
— the anxieties of debt, on the back of perturbations of aspiring
studies. The refuge, I know, is in faith and prayer : but is daily
bread promised to those who overspend their income, which I am
afraid is now my case ? However, I was deceived by the strange
misstatement about cheap living in Wales, otherwise my Muse
should have donkeyfied upon thistles from husky Hampstead this
summer, with a log at her leg. Well ! I must come to London,
sell my pianoforte, and all my nice old books, and paint the sun,
moon, and seven stars on a signboard, I suppose : would I could
get it to do !
I find I am writing strange stuff and boring you with my own

190 THE LETTERS OF
selfish troubles, so I'll have done. If you can favour me with the
three pounds, would you have the further kindness to send it as
soon as possible, and with a very full and legible direction on the
letter: what ifit should miscarry! I must stay at Tintern, and go
to plough : could you send by return of post ?
The candle is going out, as did the light of my mind some hours
ago, so I must wish you miserably, good-night.
Mn Walterjdesires me to give his love, and say that he wishes
to return directly, but not having the means, would be obliged if
you would make it up a five pound note. I will pay the postage
of this when I see you. With kindest love to Mrs. Richmond,
and such old friends as you may happen to see, I remain, my dear
Sir, Your affectionate friend, Samuel Palmer.

1838
VIII. To Mr. George Richmond.
Naples, June, 1838.
My DEAR Sir. We got into the vettura on Tuesday morning,
and encountered a torment of fleas (thought by some of the self-
denying Fathers so useful in the disturbing of sloth), which has been
increasing up to the present moment.
We saw the lake Albana, which I thought very tame, as well as
the environs of the town. Whatever foregrounds the Campagna
may afford, the view of it from a height is anything but inviting.
I think we can bear barrenness better in a foreground than at a
distance ; for landscape should be the symbol of prospects bright
ening in futurity. I noticed the beautiful town on the hill you
mentioned, and liked it much. We were much pleased with the
mountains on our left, going through Velletri ; and surprised at the
gigantic rock of Terracina.
Along the Pontine marshes, so well drained and cultivated, I
feasted my eyes on a quantity of English-looking copses and woods,
such as I had not seen for many months. But the country assumed
an aspect more beautiful than anything we had seen, on approach
ing Itri through wooded ravines interspersed with blocks and tables
of over-grown rock : on seeing the town with its ancient, grey castle,
I was seized, fastidious as I am about scenery, with unmingled
delight. Thence to Mola, is a rich Devonshire country, with two

SAMUEL PALMER. 101
or three very rich bits of ruin on or near the road side. At sunset
we entered the charming gardens of the hotel, an old villa, and
looked from among the terraced vineyards, over the bay to Gact.t,
" standing merrily by a haven side." I was agreeably disappointed
by the character of the first distant outline of Vesuvius, and by a
nearer view. I think the summits are grand and peculiar, and that
the tameness of the base is compensated for by the beautiful white
towns that skirt it, and the glittering villages that stretch to the
end of the promontory.
I think I have made quite sure of my drawing of ancient Rome
and the moment I cast my eyes on these mountains and on Capri,
which looks like an enchanted island, I said to Naples, " I think I
can grapple with you " ; though I have yet been out no farther
than to the Grande Bretagne, where Mr. Baring received us very
kindly, and told me of the Villa  where we are at present
lodged with Messrs. Lear and Uwins. We have a little room which
commands the bay, Vesuvius, Capri, and the whole chain of moun
tains, and which is quite cool at three in the afternoon. Indeed
though we were all day yesterday lodging-hunting (a most sudorific
employment), and had both slept the night before in a pestiferous
little den with only a thin roof between us and the sun, in a bed
not large enough for one person, with a window opening inwards
to the shaft or funnel of the house, ventilated only by blasts from
drains and kitchens, and in one of the most filthy streets, I do not,
in this blessed climate, suffer at all from heat ; but enjoy, rather,
the perspiration of walking, like a tepid bath ; and feel as if the sun
were only ripening me like the plums and peaches.
I quite agree with you that the interior of Naples is filthy and
uninteresting ; but surely on the shores of this bay one feels that
one has at last discovered the climate and the land of joy and of
enchantment. But what shall I say of Monte St. Angelo ? Surely
all the mountains we have seen would kick the beam if weighed
against its ripe convexity, and yet clifted sides. The right wing
of the bay, certainly, though cultivated, is tame. But I should fear
that such a bay, such mountains, and such a climate, are rarely to
be found elsewhere. From the very little I have seen, I should
think that here may be found united the grandest mountains with
the richness of Devonshire valleys. We have just been along the
Vomera ; and tame as Naples is, surely the country seems made

192 THE LETTERS OF
for joy and love. My first wish, in the overflowing of my heart,
was to know whether it was right to love the Devil. I could not
bear the thought of hating anything; and I should have knelt
down and prayed for him, only I was afraid it might be wicked.
I think you must have seen Baiae under bad effects or bad
weather, or perhaps it is not so fine on a nearer view ; but I caught
a distant glimpse which realized the enchanted islands, we have
sometimes dreamt of, and " cried to sleep again." In a carriage
you are obliged to go along the high roads, which always give the
worst view of a country ; but do pray bring Mrs. Richmond here
in the early autumn. Take your dinner out in a basket, and
explore every inch of the ground : such delicious air I have never
felt ; and hoping to enjoy it before long with you and Mrs.
Richmond, ere we are again " stived up " in the Via Sistina, I
remain, with kindest love to Mrs. Richmond, Tommy, and baby,
dear Sir, Your much obliged and affectionate friend, Samuel
Palmer.
When you feel disposed to write, be assured that it will be a
great treat to us : and be sure to write small, and to give us a
very long letter ; for if, as I have sometimes fear'd, my long
letters have seemed tedious to others (the suspicion of which has
almost disgusted me with writing at all to anybody), be assured a
long letter from you will be a great treat to me. My mind has for
the last year been soured and choked, with disgust at the thought
of all the things whatsoever with which I have formerly taken
great pains ; because this is, of all times, the age in which pains
taking meets with the least reward. I wish I could get back again
all the long letters which at sundry times I have written to sundry
persons. That I might burn them in a heap ? No, that I might
elaborate them into the most polished mellifluence, and publish
them for the benefit of the trunk-makers ; and then in double
disgust, leave the arts and literature altogether ; and then in triple
spite, take lodgings in the city, and work a little money about in
the Stock Exchange, and turn a penny by the little daily fluctua
tions — and so, rot. I shall, if I live, begin Baiae to-morrow, and
give my whole soul to the work that the world may spit upon it
the more scornfully.
But on the other hand, if I get on, I shall I hope become a
good man, a wise, a temperate, and a just — do much good to

SAMUEL PALMER.

'93

others, and just grease my own wheels once a month, with the
goose-club which I shall forthwith establish, of which you shall
only be an " associate exhibitor " till you have learned to cat the
richest bit of fat in the "apron." N.B. Von will perceive, from its
colloquial fluency, that this epistle has not been written from a
rough copy. As I was in great haste, it abounds with extempo
raneous elegances of bad grammar and construction.

IX. To Mr. and Mrs. George Richmond.
Corpo DI Cava. Improvise and warm from the heart. September 16, 1838.
My dear Mr. and Mrs. Richmond. I am told that I
behaved rudely on my travels. Now I have forgotten these
things, but remembering that the heart that once truly hates never
forgets, it struck me that because you took me for a monster you
have not answered my letter from Naples, and I write again to tell
you that Caliban still loves you, and is doing his best not merely
by a blind copying of nature but by studying his art in nature,
and endeavouring to get from that great storehouse substantial
principles and philosophic views of his profession, to show you
that your kindness in enabling him to make this great tour was
not thrown away. If I can, by what I am doing, convince you of
this, I shall be amply repaid for intense study and unwearied
application. ... At Naples, Mrs. P. made a panoramic sketch of
the whole city from the gardens of a villa : studies of Vesuvius,
St. Angelo, and the bay, from our window ; and a small copy of a
most exquisite Correggio in the museum. I secured a large
drawing of Naples, a smaller of the same, and a large view of
Baiae. At Pompeii I got five drawings, including the theatre,
amphitheatre, and the street of the tombs : and at Corpo di Cava
... I have got a large drawing of the town and convent, and
about a dozen smaller subjects ; besides hints, outlines, and memo
randa, in my little sketch-books, which I now always carry about
with me.
In this place a load has been lifted off my mind which has
hung upon me for more than a year, and has been as troublesome
as John Giles's " loaf." 1 I now see my way, and think I am no longer
I1 My father alludes to the consequences of Mr. Giles having been beguiled by himself
O

194

THE LETTERS OF

a mere maker of sketches, but an artist. I only hope it may not
turn out a delusion, and prove a " horse-shoe " at last.
If we are spared, we shall visit Amalfi and Ravella hastily, for
motives and outlines, and return to Naples, where Anny will copy
the other little Correggio, and I shall explore Baiae. Then we
hope to grapple with Tivoli, and [to] resume our labours at Rome,
where we earnestly hope to see you in the winter ; afterwards, to
have a fierce grapple with Terni ; then, to get some views of
Florence, and return home laden with spoil, which we hope may
not be mislaid or lost at the Custom-house before those " great
gods " the Academicians come down and pass them.
You will be pleased to hear that Mrs. Palmer has had a dose
of landscape-drawing at Corpo di Cava, and has made great
improvement ; getting her hand into it, and working with great
freedom and success. . . . My dear Mr. and Mrs. Richmond, my
old and tried friends, believe me Ever yours most affectionately,
Samuel Palmer.

X. To Mr. Edward Calvert.
Naples, <)th October, 1838.
My very dear Friend. Ever since my arrival in Rome
I have been thinking of you, desiring to write, and longing to hear
from you. I wished also to give you pleasure by telling you about
some of the grand things I had seen ; but filled more than the
space of a letter with a really concise account reaching no farther
than the Louvre ; so many novelties had presented themselves.
This discouraged me, for if I were less particular, you would only
have a catalogue which you might find in commonplace-books of
travels. But I am so pricked with compunction that write I will,
if there be only room to mention a few works of creation or art
which impressed me with their novelty or beauty : though to you,
who have travelled so much, it will be little more than the reviving
of old recollections.
At Calais I entered for the first time a Continental Romish
cathedral, and was delighted with its rich and furnished fulness.
and the other "Ancients" into tathing with them in the Darent after dinner. The
victim was afterwards long troubled by a sensation which he described as an internal
quartern loaf. — Ed.]

SA M UE L PA L ME R.

'95

Besides the great altar, there were smaller ones with their statues,
pictures, marbles, and other enrichments, in every side recess ; and
I then little thought that the same were to be seen in thousands
even of the smaller civic churches of the Continent. The
picturesque poor people also, leaving their avocations for a few
moments, and kneeling about the doors, and in the dim recesses,
added to the comfort and furnished appearance of the temple ; for
which, I doubt not, in Other Eyes than ours, the religious poor are
the richest of all decorations. We were much pleased too, with
the high, strange towers, and old-fashioned market-places and
piazzas, with their market-carts, and gay but rustic costumes, and
the profusion of fruit and vegetables spread over them : very
different in the painter's eye to Covent Garden, but perhaps after
all, not containing so many or so good eatables.
The Louvre, in the gardens of which I was first delighted with
the sight of statues in pure air and brilliant sunshine, contains a
splendid collection of antique sculpture. Three-fourths of the
pictures are of little interest ; but then, those which remain are in
themselves a most noble gallery. They are, however, with the
exception of two rooms (in one of which happily, hangs the
Marriage of Cana), most vilely lighted : but there are Giorgiones
and Titians which would make sunshine in any other darkness
than the darkness of the Louvre. The Marriage of Cana is I
think, in some respects, the most extraordinary picture of its size I
•ever saw. All is pitched in the highest key of light, and in the
purest brilliancy of colour : not tinged with golden, evening light,
yet all glowing with the joy of mid-day sunshine — full of
brightness and full of depth ; having all the treasures of the
palette, yet no weight of pigment — the last facility of imitation,
yet no flippancy ; and though of immense size, and crowded with
subject, bearing not a symptom of dulness, doubt, weariness,
neglect, or delay. To see this alone, is well worth the journey to
Paris. Then in the dark galleries or rather caves beyond,
coruscate, rather to the mind than to the dilated, straining eye,
" full many a gem of purest ray serene." But I cannot bear to
talk or think of the barbarity which could place them where they
are: it is a dark mine, but it is indeed a golden one. For the
Luxembourg gallery we had no time.
Every one should see the Gothic Church of St. Eustache ; not so
o a

196 THE LETTERS OF
large as Notre Dame, but to my taste, of much finer art ; uniting,
without mixture of the styles, in a remarkable manner, the
proportions of Greek and Norman architecture. It seems to me a
great master-piece of symmetry, giving length, breadth, and height ;
without sacrificing either to the others. . . .
Almost our first glimpse of Italy was the dawn glimmering
behind the mountains of Lago Maggiore, from a balcony of our
inn, trellised with flowers. The pinnacles of Milan cathedral
studded with sculpture, seem carved of ivory. Within, all is richness
and poetic gloom. In the library, are some small, exquisitely-
finished designs in chalk by Michelangelo, and heads, by Da Vinci,
of which the features are turned with unrivalled subtlety and
elegance. The picture-gallery we missed. The Last Supper is a
wreck. At Parma I climbed up so as to be close to Correggio's
dome, but it was so faint and damaged, that I did not enjoy it.
Walking by moonlight through the arcades of Bologna, I was
astonished at the vastness of its churches, and the terrific height of
its leaning towers ; seeming twice that of our Monument ; but I
then had not seen Rome.
We just lunched and slept at places whose treasures of art
would have have occupied weeks to explore them. We had a
glorious journey over the Apennines to Florence ; everywhere
finding that beautiful characteristic of Italy, the village or city on
the hill, cresting the woody summit or rocky precipice with
human, and sometimes with historic interest. How different were
Wales so ornamented ! The vast, cultivated plain of Florence,
stretching away between the receding Apennines till they vanish
in Italian air and Italian light, leave nothing to be wished. De
scending to Florence, we looked up upon Fiesole, the watch
tower of the " Tuscan Artist," and soon entered that blessed city
so dear to the lovers of art and of the old philosophy. Its admix
ture of art, primitive and mature ; its dusky, semi-barbarous
Cathedral ; its sumptuous Baptistry ; its turreted, baronial palace,
with the colossal statues of Michelangelo in the court beneath,
indelibly impress the mind with their sullen stateliness and
strength. I think of this city as of a heavy, old-fashioned, yet
rich and exquisitely-wrought golden cabinet, containing in its
caskets and curious recesses, specimens of all in art that is most
pathetic and sublime. May we have time to explore it on our

SAMUEL P A L M ER. I y 7
return ! The gallery here is a splendid collection : the Pitti we
did not see. Here are also twenty thousand drawings by the ( >ld
Masters, frescoes of the choicest age, and everything which can
make Florence the kernel of art. We did not stop to sec the falls
of Terni, reserving them for a hard sketching week by and bye.
At last we saw and entered the Eternal Cit)- — that wilderness
of wonders, of which it is impossible to say little, and needless to
say anything, as you have seen that, and almost everything else
which we have visited ; so nothing remains but a little chatter
about ourselves.
The weather was for months very rainy, and (we being
without a fireplace) so cold that I wore a waistcoat lined with
flannel, and Mrs. Palmer wrapped up like a mummy. To me, our
December was nothing like it, and it seemed rather strange, in a
climate which, I had been told, ripened strawberries at Christmas.
However, I bore it with an allowance of English grumbling, and
learned in time to wade along the streets, avoiding the water
spouts which concentrate the rain on the tops of the houses, an,'d
hurl it down in torrents to scour away the filth. When the sun
burst forth, out I popped, like the lady in the weather-box, and
tried to draw white palaces so sunny that the white paper seemed
" double smut " against them. Mrs. P., meanwhile, went every
morning about two miles by herself to the Vatican, to copy the
Bible subjects in the Loggia ; being occasionally annoyed a little
on the way ; people calling after her " Piccola Inglese " &c.
Then we met at our room in the twilight, and turning down a
dark passage and opening a little door, found ourselves at our
dinner-table, with Messrs. Gibson. Williams, &c, where the hour
passed very pleasantly after our labours, in chewing, chattering,
and laughing. Conversation you know, in the true sense of the
word, is banished from civilized society.
Mr. Baring, through Mr. Richmond's kind introduction, com
missioned me to make him a large drawing of modern Rome, with
which Mr. R. told me Mr. B. was very highly pleased. I also
much pleased Messrs. Gibson and Williams, with a drawing of
Ponte Rotto, which I exhibited. I tell you these little things,
because I know you are really pleased with any good that befalls
me. Mrs. P. was very ill for a month soon after our arrival, but
quite recovered.

J98 THE LETTERS OF
At last we set out for Naples, and when we got upon the hills,
and I saw it glittering through the gardens and vineyards, my
heart opened, and I felt goodwill even for the Devil. It seems to
me that all the choicest effects of shade and colour, all the happiest
accidents— all the blooms and blushes of Nature hover about this
enchanted region. But there is a summit farther on whence the
whole panorama is spread out — Naples, Vesuvius, Baiae, and
Camaldoli — O ! such a scene ! — It would have made " Sam Weller"
sentimental !
We lived a month in Pompeii, dining in one of the antique
vaults, and living for the first time in a room with an unglazed
window : we had only to step out, and we were in the " city of the
dead." Here Mrs. P. made thirteen sketches of the antique
pictures, and we saw a slight eruption of Vesuvius, of which I gave
a short account in a letter to Mr. Linnell which you have probably
seen. We then stayed two months at Corpo di Cava, commanding
the finest distant mountains I have seen, and are now in Naples
once more, to get a second view of Baiae, intending, in a day or two,
to trace its beautiful shores.
I will, if possible, get a sketch of that white temple you saw
while anchoring in the bay. How I should enjoy a long talk over
it, and over a large cup of tea — pure terra-vert ! When shall we
join again by an English fireside, over that intellectual, social, but
long untasted beverage ?
... I have been thinking a great deal about the principles and
practice of art, and endeavouring very much to increase my
acquaintance with the phenomena of nature, 'as well as working
hard and incessantly, with the exception of time consumed in
travelling ; so I am in full energy, with my will and determination
not a whit unstrung by time, and hope to bring forth fruit in my
old age. Travelling, so far from unsettling me, has, I am sure,
limited and concentrated my desires and on a few points, calmed
my mind most sweetly. I never had a Haydonish rage for big
pictures ; but now I have seen how even Raffaelle was set to paint
dark chambers like a house-decorator, with a window coming in
the middle of one of his finest ; how an altar is fixed up for months
against the Charon group in The Last Judgement, and how the
same kind of homage is paid to works of genius in most of the
Churches which are fortunate enough to possess them, I look upon

SA M UE I PA I ME R. 190.
a kit-cat panel as, after all, the most enviable field for exertion
Besides, I think the Great Masters themselves, with very few
exceptions, distilled more of their intensity into little cabinet
pictures than upon great walls and altar-pieces. Such wrought
and polished gems as Mr. Mulready's Seven Ages, the half of which
I was fortunate enough to see, leave a deeper dent in my memory
than many of the great Jupiters and St. Jeromes sprawling over
large ceilings and saloons.
It is moonlight, and the Bay of Naples fills up our window,
sparkling like diamonds on ebony : what a pretty thing to do with
our blue-black flake-white !
I was thinking the other day that opposites are not, as we may
have been used to consider them, at enmity with each other —
giving spirit to a work by their violent contention ; but they are
like the truest friends, manifesting each other's perfections. How
ever, perhaps both views are right, though seemingly difficult to be
reconciled. Certainly, red manifests the beauty of green, and
green the beauty of red. It may be said that it is the same with
moral opposites, for that they also manifest each other ; but the
analogy goes no farther ; for though vice manifests the beauty of
virtue, virtue does not manifest the beauty of vice, but its ugliness.
Now the opposites in art make each other look the better — the
advantage is not merely on one side.
I have carefully examined the Pompeian pictures, which offer
much matter for consideration. Mrs. Palmer has copied the best
of those in the ruined city ; and as I was obliged to be with her,
here and elsewhere, to protect her from Neapolitan insolence, I
saw them well. I remember writing to Mr. Linnell, while they
were fresh in my memory, that joints and articulations were
shaken out of the pencil with the facility of a Gainsborough's pollards ;
and really if these [pictures], as is perhaps the case, were executed
by second-rate artists, the first-rate men must have possessed a
mastery over the figure of which later ages have shown very few
examples. They are also full of life and elegance, but show, I
think, no traces of those discoveries by which Da Vinci and others
added so much to the sciences of chiaroscuro arid colour. The
pigment in the lights is remarkable for fulness and fatness ;
therein exceeding, if I remember well, the frescoes of the Cinque
Cento. There are a great number in the Neapolitan Museum,

2oo THE LETTERS OF
where Mrs. P. is now copying a splendid, impasted little Correggio
of the Madonna and Child with St. Catherine, which I think I have
often heard you speak of. It cost eighteen thousand dollars, if I
rightly understood the custode. Though the lights are so richly
impasted, yet the dark, transparent shadows, and lucid, semi-
transparent half-tints, project beyond them, when you look along
t he surface ; which, with other reasons, makes me think that the
painters of that age used a great deal of vehicle in their shadows
something like copal, not oil merely, or soft varnish, which I
think would not stand up and remain as it was first laid on.
I have been out of practice in oil-painting for a year, but have
endeavoured in my mind to analyze the process, and think I
should go to work now with much more certainty. I often wish I
could consult with you and ask your opinion on points of art ; for
I reverence more and more, philosophical and ordered wisdom,
though I shall always desire the liberty of doubting where I am
not convinced, and of demurring at axioms which do not seem
self-evident to me, though they may be clear to another as the sun
at noon-day. I hope you will send me some account of what you
have been doing since we parted, and be kind enough to com
municate any great principles or trains of thought that may be
strongly on your mind at this time, that all intellectual intercourse
may not be denied me, though I am cast so far away. But as
there are times in which one does not feel prepared for writing
upon art, or has not time for it, do not delay a letter on that
account ; but when I push my card through the post-office grating
at Rome, let me be revived by the sight of your hand-writing,
at all events. Give my kindest love to Mrs. Calvert (for I suppose
a married man may send his love to a married lady without
danger of being called out) ; and the same to the dear children
who I hope are growing fast, both in wisdom and stature. Tell
them I often think of them, and imagine how I shall enjoy to find a
year and a half's improvement in each of their heads when I come
back. I can think of scarcely anything that would give me greater
pleasure than to see them grow up wise and brilliant men, and
little Mary an elegant, accomplished woman, in the true sense
of the words.
I hope you have not quite forgotten that "There is a plant
grows in a wood," &c. ; for if I remember, you were getting rather

SAMUEL PALMER. 201
lax on that point. I believe if an angel were to come down and
whip us every Monday morning, it would give us a fillip, and do
us all much good. Wishing you every happiness and blessing,
and above all, those choicest blessings on which, as we differ
so widely, I have forborne to speak, I remain to the heart's
core, my dear Sir, Your affectionate friend, SAMUEL PALMER.

XI. To Mr. Samuel Giles.
Pozzuoli, October 28, 1838.
To my dear Mrs. Giles, and to the rest of my dear
Cousins in King William Street assembled, greeting.
An account of all the novelties which I have seen, if hung from
the top of the Monument, would trail upon London Bridge ;
therefore I will just mention a few things as they occur to me, and
waive all introductories excepting an apology for having seemed
to neglect you so long, occasioned by a continual press of labour
and study, which has prevented my writing a line to any one, but
in our periodical letters to Bayswater. Yet, many a time, have I
sat down in spirit by your cheerful and intellectual fireside, where
have passed some of my very happiest hours.
The inside of a Romish church was the first novelty which
presented^itself ; not a believer's band-box, in which the greatest
quantity of lace caps and laces are crowded into the smallest
possible space, partitioned out into dress boxes called pews, for
the comfort of consciences too tender for the opera ; where fine
ladies cover their heads with Valenciennes to play at hide and seek
with the angels (by which, perhaps, were meant, says Dr. Gill,
young ministers), and making what is called a respectable congre
gation — a thriving interest. Not this, but a refuge for the abject
and the outcast, the peasant and the pilgrim ; with no free seats,
where all are free, to publish his poverty — no brandy-faced
beadle to drive Lazarus from the door, and waddle before Dives to
the chief seats. A continental church is no whitewashed pantile
shop for paroquet costume, where a picture or statue could not be
tolerated for fear of worldly pomp ! But a temple enriched by the
noblest talents of man for the honour of God, and opening its
gates for him who has no other friend. I expected to find one

202 THE LETTERS OF
great altar, gorgeously decorated, and no more ; but found an altar
enriched with carved wood, statuary, pictures, and precious
marbles in every side recess, and between the pilasters all along
the side aisles ; so that service may proceed, without much
interruption, in several places at once : and there are groups of
poor market-people, who have laid down their baskets for a
few moments (some still poorer), praying in oratories and dim
recesses ; and others prostrate at the door.
Thus far all is right, tho' the Romanists have not been wanting
in other means of money-getting ; but there are things more
questionable. In the churches of Naples you see life-size figures
of the Virgin, dressed out in the height of the fashion of the time
when they were made ; with stay-tight waists, and Bond Street
hips, and rings on their fingers. When an image of the Madonna
makes a procession through the streets it is preceded by soldiers
with fixed bayonets, and a military band playing merry tunes.
An image which I saw carried in Rome, with seven daggers in her
breast, was, I think, borne by butchers — at least it was the
butchers' costume, which is said to be that of the sacrificing priests
of Jupiter. Like the Pagan household gods, little ugly dolls of
the Virgin and Saints under glass cases are kept in many of the
houses ; and votive offerings are hung in profusion in some of the
churches, before the shrine of the delivering saint : horribly-painted
little pictures too of remarkable deliverances from fire, drowning,
or spirited horses, are suspended about them : and at a favourite
shrine of Our Lady I saw innumerable knives stuck into leather
thongs up the wall, which were the weapons of converted
assassins. You see parents lifting up their children to kiss the
foot of a Saint. That of St. Peter in the Vatican, though of brass,
is much worn.
No one was ever more cruelly or unexpectedly disappointed than
myself with almost all the church music I have heard in France and
Italy. During the consecration of the Host, they play operatic
music ; and an organist once, who could not please the congregation
by other melodies, played the air of " Go to the Devil and shake
yourself," very much to their satisfaction. An eminent artist at
Rome, who is also an organist, told me that after wearying a con
vent with fine music, he quite delighted them with " Bumper Squire
Jones." At high mass I have heard the chant of the priest ac-

SAMUEL PALMER. 203
companied in the most frivolous taste ; and when after loud music
there comes an unaccompanied chant, the organ keeps the priest in
tune with a loud shrieking note now and then, all the stops having
been left open. The vocal choir of St. Peter's and the Sistine
Chapel is very fine, but in the gallery of the former the leader
stands in front beating time ver)- energetically, and the cries of
" Piano ! Piano ! " are rather forte, and much too distinctly audible.
We saw the grand Easter ceremonies, and were several times
within a yard of the Pope. We saw him wash the feet of the
thirteen priests (whom he afterwards waits on at dinner, girding
himself with a napkin), and after singing mass, bless the immense
assembled multitudes from the facade of St. Peter's. This is a sub
lime spectacle — thousands of country people in their picturesque
costumes, beating their breasts, holding out strings of beads, and
awaiting, in breathless silence, the great benediction. When the
Pope appears, all is hushed. He spreads out his arms over the
people and blesses them ; and then, all in a moment, the great guns
of St. Angelo fire, the martial bands distributed over the piazza,
strike up, and the bells of the city, which are silenced through Pas
sion Week, ring out a peal. Before this, at the grand mass at St.
Peter's, at the moment when the elements are consecrated and all
are prostrate, a slow, sublime harmony of wind instruments peals
along from over the great western door, softened in this im
mense vault as in the open air. The dome, though much higher
and vaster than St. Paul's, is not, in my judgment, nearly so sub
lime ; and in sublimity and musical effect I think the grandest
ceremonials of the Vatican are far short of our cathedral worship.
We found the scenery from Calais to Paris pretty tolerable in
places, but the few villages on the high road looking very desolate
and deserted. Indeed, throughout our French journey, excepting
one single village in the south, all the little country places appeared
dismantled and wretched, with not a gleam of cottage comfort.
No rustic chimney " between two aged oaks " (for forest timber
we saw none till we came to Switzerland), no " neat handed
Phillis " ; but houses in the taste of Walworth Common and Rother-
hithe, only without, or with broken, glass, and tumbling to decay ;
and instead of ruddy ploughmen, ragged, sallow, blue-coated mon-
sieurs ; the whole looking as if it had been purged, not purified,
through twenty, instead of three or four revolutions. This is not

204 THE LETTERS OF
caricature, or an exaggeration of the general impression made on
my senses. Our modern philosophers say, I believe, that our ideas
come only through the medium of the senses, and really the sense
of smelling is by no means an inactive agent in forming one's idea
of France and Italy ; nor the sense of feeling in the flea season,
though happily for us, in Rome (to parody the kitten pie-man),
when frosts was in, fleas was out. In Rome, where the bed-linen is
shaken into the streets, we are told that in summer the fleas swarm
you so as you walk that people are obliged to change their clothes
when they come in ; and at Naples, those little creatures which in
the language of Dante are called " pedoccii " so abound that they
are sent home in the clean linen. However, a comb and soapsuds
would sooner clean one of these, than the most stoic philosophy of
the blue devils in lurid London. These vermin, though they cer
tainly do not contribute to ease, are light and limber enough to
grace the modern style of epistolary correspondence, which is said
to derive most of its grace from facility of movement.
The fury and vociferation, and brutal, butt-end horsewhipping
of French diligence drivers are a strange contrast to the quiet
mastery of the "Mr. Wellers " of old England. But the movement-
note of one of our charioteers was very curious : while he was
beating away with all his might, he was exalting his cattle with a
tone exactly like the cooing of a dove !
We arrived at midnight in Paris, and put up with a most dismal-
looking room in a great hotel whose gates were guarded by sentries
Nothing in travelling is so wretched as a night arrival in a strange
city. We were surprised to find no soap on our wash-stands, but
soon found it was an unheard-of luxury which we must buy and
carry about with us through the whole journey. We found here
several pretty nauseous examples of French filthiness.
At the risk of being every moment pushed down or run over,
we began to explore Paris — were delighted with the Louvre, tho'
the pictures are hung in the dark, but had not time for the Luxem
bourg. We were detained day after day by the shameful delays
of the passport system, [and] our consolation was to creep now and
then into the Louvre. We did not then know that by giving a few
francs to the commissionaire of the inn, all would have been done
for us. O ! the physiognomies that I saw in the public offices ! We
were told that, some time since, the present liberal government took

SA M UF. I PA I. ME R. 205
away from travellers on the frontiers the pistols which they carried
for their private safety. The new king's soldier.-, form a guard of
honour with a standard, over the graves of the so-called patriots
who were killed in the act of dethroning the last monarch !
I shall not easily forget some grand old fortified and cathedral
towns near the Swiss frontiers of France. Wc had just a glimpse
of their grey fanes and mouldering battlements before we entered
for the night, and left them before daylight in the morning ; which,
when we looked back, wc saw glimmering upon them in the valleys
beneath. Sometimes the morning mist filled up the vales and
plains like an ocean with its friths and bays ; while the rising sun,
striking upon the island-like summits and mountains, fired with
living gold here and there an ancient village or city on their
glowing ridges. Sometimes what seemed to be sky opened and
disclosed a patriarchal village nestled among the pastoral downs,
and glistening like silver or pearl through the rarer vapour ; or the
cloud would partially vanish or rise like a curtain, and disclose a
champaign country at our feet ; while, on either side of the road,
the village people were brushing away the dew from the ripe vine
yards, and piling up the purple treasure in baskets, or loading
them upon teams of cream-coloured oxen.
Then came the wonders of Switzerland ; while, winding up and
down among vast green or furrowed slopes, or shaded by luxuriant
forest timber, we saw the hoary Alps at sixty miles' distance
glimmering like sunny clouds across the horizon — above them,
greyer or more vaporous colour, and the Alps again ! Lausanne
sweeps down with its terraces and gardens to the margin of the
great lake as it seems, though a mile intervenes, which is lost in
the stupendous scale by which the eye measures everything : being
filled with the giant forms on the other side.
On the hilly environs of the Lago Maggiore stands the statue
of St. Charles Borromeo as large as a tower, with his hand
stretched out over the country, as if blessing all beneath him.
There is a staircase inside the statue, and several people can dine
in his head. Mr. and Mrs. Richmond and Mrs. Palmer saw it, and
a room where this blessed saint and servant of God was born, with
a cast of his face, some of his hair &c. I did not, being plagued with
heavy boots, and unable to ascend to these precious relics, which
I reckon a great loss. I however saw the statue at a distance.

206 THE LETTERS OF
Our first sight of the lake was from a flower-trellised balcony
at the inn, with the first crimson flush of dawn glowing behind its
mountains. Milan cathedral is a wonder of holy, Gothic, inspired art, and
its dim religious light gilds the very recesses of the soul. It is the
antithesis of the new Post- Office, and not very similar to the
National Gallery.
But Florence is the " city of my soul " — quaint, antique,
stately, and gorgeous, and full of the gems of those divine and
divinely inspired arts which, three centuries ago, lived there in
wedded love with the old Platonic philosophy. Not the pot and
kettle philosophy of The Useful Knowledge Society, beginning in
steam-engines and ending in money and smoke, but visionary and
ideal — the solid food of the soul. For money and beef are not, as
people imagine, the solid things of the mind ; but as unreal and
unsatisfying to the immortal part, as a lecture on metaphysics
would be to a hungry belly.
But what shall I say of Rome, of whose wonders a tenth part
I have not seen, yet have seen what would fill a volume ? Its
churches are cathedrals, and its Vatican larger than the city of
Turin within the walls. Rome is a thing by itself which, once
seen, leaves the memory no more — a city of Art which one had
dreamed of before, and can scarce believe that one has really seen
with these ocular jellies  to which London seems a warehouse,
and Paris a trinket-shop. What must it have been in its antique
glory ? You can only look at its dazzling palaces, blazing in
Italian sunshine, with your eyes half shut. Indeed, Italian air
and Italian light, and the azure of an Italian sky, can scarcely be
imagined in England. It spreads its magic over streets and
houses, and invests the commonest objects with a peculiar beauty :
but the people do not, I fear, plunge into the Tiber after athletic
games as heretofore, or wash their carcases as we do every
morning in cold water ; for they leave a wake of unsavoury odour
behind them as they walk the streets, which are strewed with filth.
We have lately been exploring the wonderful environs of
Naples, are now at Pozzuoli (Puteoli, where St. Paul landed), and
hope soon to be in Rome for the winter.
I grieve to pass another Christmas without our family meeting.
It made me sad last year to think of it, and 1 do earnestly hope,

0 4,

SAMUEL PALMER.

207

my dear John, that we shall spend next Christmas but one
together, and in company with our feathered friend, whom I have
not forgotten, though my last sight of him was in your company.
Green tea too, and the bookish evening have charms to draw me
to England, where I hope we shall often enjoy them together.
Pray write me a long letter .... and tell me what delightful
books you may have lighted on since my departure, and how little
Willy and Samuel get on with their studies, which I long to know.
Give my best love to them, and tell them they are not forgotten.
Pray begin to write as soon as you get this, and write five minutes
a day in a very small hand till the letter is full.
I saw Dr. Wiseman at the Easter ceremonies, with a purple
gown and fur tippet, looking as sleek and fat as ever, and heard
him preach once or twice. He has been getting up performances
of Shakespeare's plays by his pupils of the English Academy.
He sings, and is, I believe, fond of the arts.
I have been received with great respect by the first English
artists in Rome, who were much pleased with a drawing I exhibited
there. Mr. Richmond kindly introduced me to Mr. Baring, who
gave me forty guineas for a view of the city, for his father's, Sir
Thomas Baring's, collection. We met with a very pleasant and
intellectual friend in a son of Sir Thomas Acland, who passed a
good deal of time with us at Naples. I have said nothing about
Mr. Richmond as I know he has been in correspondence with
you : indeed, I am very anxious to know where he is, as I do not
much think he remained at Florence. Pray let me know, if you
have heard. Do not forget between you to get me up a long
letter. Give my love to all relations and friends, and believe me,
my dear cousin, Ever yours affectionately, Samuel Palmer.
When we were leaving Pozzuoli this morning, I saw a monk
getting the materials for a dinner in a very cheap and ingenious
way. He was presenting to all the old men and women in the
little fish-market a glazed, coloured print of the Virgin to kiss,
and was in turn presented by each with a small fish, which he
carefully deposited in his handkerchief. I think in Billingsgate
he would find himself as much out of his element as the fish
themselves. We have just heard from Mrs. Tatham (their aunt, at Naples),
that the Richmonds are at Rome ; that Mr. R. is now quite well ;
that Mrs. R. has continued all along in perfect health ; and that the

208 THE LETTERS OF
Roman baby has cut six teeth and is a giant. Our children also
are, I trust, pretty well. They are twins ; viz. Mrs. Palmer's
drawings and my own. Dear little creatures ! They will I hope,
support us instead of our having to keep tliem, which I hope will
not be long ; for I desire speedily to launch them on the tide with
a favourable gale. If they sail into the port of prosperity, people
will begin to say, " What a nice young man Mr. Palmer is. Ah !
I always said he would get on." Perhaps now they say, " Do you
know that old fellow Palmer, with grey bristles on his head — he's
an odd fish, isn't he ? " If I get on, I mean to live most temperately,
but to establish a monthly Goose Club, with a few select friends
who appreciate that noble bird. The morning to be. spent in
reading our old poets, the bird to be discussed about two o'clock,
and vivid green tea to be brought in at four, and kept on the hob
all the evening ; during which, over a blazing fire, we can talk over
our old times at Greenwich and Shoreham, and have a little bit of
Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess now and then, or some of your old
sophisticated Catholic books, dear John, which you must bring in
your pocket. Tell me where you spent last Christmas Day, and
whether you mourned, as I did, that the old family compact was
broken up.
My dear Albert, if you go on drawing, continue to study from
the divine, eternal, naked form of man, even if you are driven out
from the society of men, and obliged to pursue your studies in a
hay-loft. Take the greatest pains to secure a beautiful outline, and
study from the works of the finest masters. Every inch you gain
in this way is a mile. The devout and holy study of the naked
form purifies the imagination and affections, and makes us less
pervious to evil temptation. Here, beauty is often the whited
sepulchre of vice ; but in eternity that human form is, as it were, the
body and symbol of goodness and truth. Seas may forsake their
channels, mountains be shaken to their base, but the eternal form
of man will survive the wreck, and, as it existed from eternity in
the Divine Idea, will flourish in immortal youth amid the " clash
of worlds." I again subscribe myself, my dear cousin, Yours most
affectionately. S. P.
Now ! Do you think I'm mad, all of you ? If I am, come and
be bitten, for the vaccination of artistic madness is a good specific
against the small-pox of worldly vanities.
Excuse bad composition, for I write in great haste.

.9 A AI UEL PALME R. 20()

1839
XII. To Dr. Walter Williams.
Rome, March iS, 1839.
My DEAR Sir. In case you should have forgotten that there
is such a person in the world as S. P., he begs to inform you that
he is still in the body, but that his spirit has often, during the last
eighteen months, sat by your hospitable fireside when you little
suspected who was there.
We peculiarly cherish the memory of those friends who have
the power of catering for us a happy, intellectual, leisure day.
This power you possess in a high degree ; and you must allow me,
if ever^a day's, or half a day's leisure comes again, to spend it with
you. I do hope to afford a bookish day now and then ; having
arrived at the age when man begins to simplify his projects, and
find out that he has only two things to take care of — viz., to please
God and to mind his trade. But how highly are we privileged,
having professions so intellectual (and yours so benevolent),
offering a boundless scope for curiosity and investigation. Still,
much as I love my calling, I am a true bookworm, and hope on
my return to find, about once a month, a whole day for a Great
Read ! " Some place their bliss in action " — I in a dull, pattering,
gusty, December day, which forbids our wishes to rove beyond the
tops of the chimney-pots ; a good register stove ; a sofa strewed
with books ; a reading friend, and above all, a locked door for
bidding impertinent intrusions. There should be a light dinner
about one o'clock ; then a little prosy chat (not too argumentive),
just to help digestion ; then books again, till blessed green-tea-
time winds us up for Macbeth or Hamlet and ecstasy. Late
dinners spoil everything : they cut Up intellectual evenings. But
on my plan, you rise betimes the next morning, with alacrity, to
those daily duties in which every good man ought to find his
pleasure — robust disciplines which chasten and invigorate our
fallen, idle nature, and without which, we soon become at once
weak and mischievous. Happy are those who have an imperative
daily occupation. Respectable, in the true sense of the word, are all
those who do their best in that calling, be it ever so humble.
Away with that libel on Providence which dignifies only the richer

210 THE LETTERS OF
members of society with the title of respectability. Is it not
disgusting and almost blasphemous to talk even of respectable
congregations in our churches ; meaning that few poor people
frequent them — those poor to whom it was the crowning glory
of Christ's ministry that the Gospel was preached. Meaning that
the clergyman's exquisitely-tied cravat, and sweet amalgam
of Christianity and gentility, draw after it hosts of silly women,
swimming and strutting into the presence of their God, with
laces, and trinkets, and smelling-bottles, and birds' feathers ? The
whitest-winged angel of Heaven thinks the chimney-sweep and
scavenger who twitch and trundle their brooms with energy and
skill, truly respectable ; though their dirty fellow-sinners in
shiny hats and superfine coats, think differently. As, however,
you are in a learned and most truly noble profession, and I in one
which even the stupid pride of fashion thinks tolerable, we
are spared the insults which Dives has ever cast at Lazarus ; and
have each of us the privilege of going to Hell like a Christian and
a gentleman. You, however, have, I believe and know, declined
availing yourself of this privilege, and are, by divine grace, toiling
up the narrow hill-path which leads to Life. But alas, with all
its blessings, how sore a temptation is the all-absorbing interest of
a liberal or learned art : how often does it leave only the dregs of
the mind, the sleepy or exhausted hours, for communion with
God ! Happy are those who find Him and adore Him everywhere,
as they investigate His beautiful creation ; and in whom (to murder
Wordsworth's language, which I cannot accurately remember) the
smallest flower that blows gives " Thoughts that often lie too deep
for tears ! " Perhaps it is owing to the all-absorbing interest of the
arts and sciences that " not many wise " are effectually called ; and
that Religion, too sincere and too humble for polite or learned society,
is often found sitting with the cobbler in his stall — turning the very
clang of his hammer into music, or hiding herself from dons and
dandies, among the butter-tubs in a chandler's shop.
) If angels laugh at all, they must laugh till they shake the
feathers out of their wings to see one poor insect scorning another
because it is not dappled with such butterfly colours ; but our pride
of dress is sillier still, for we do not even strut in our own plumage,
but in the hides of beasts and the feathers of birds ! Stripped and
stark, Caesar is as " poor, bare, forked an animal " as " Sam Weller."

S A M UEL PAL ME R. 2 1 1
But I have no more time to scribble ; and therefore, hoping that
we may soon have a long meeting in England, and a longer still
when this corruptible shall have put an incorruption, I remain with
very, very, very, kindest regards to Mr. and Mrs. Williams, my
dear Sir, Your ever affectionate friend, SAMUEL Palmer.
P.S. If I had another sheet to fill I would not say one word
about luscious Italy, or its kernel Rome ; because expectation is
so wound up about letters from hence that one is sure to disap
point it. Only, by the bye, please to take notice that I have not
approximated one inch towards Romanism, though I hope to live
and die an English Catholic of our Protestant Church. Also,
I hope you have not swerved towards dissent. We ought to love
the persons of dissenters and of the whole human family, daily
more and more, and it is our duty to proselytize whenever we can,
while we take care not to be ourselves entrapped, or to run
the least hazard of " perishing in the gainsaying of Core."

J848
XIII. To Mr. Edward Calvert.
[Laira, Devon], fuly 25, 1848.
My Dear Friend. I have this instant arrived at Laira, very
tired, having risen at half-past three this morning, and travelled
from the north Cornish coast ; yet I have seen so much within the
last three hours to remind me of yourself and Mrs. Calvert, that I
cannot refrain from just sending a line to tell you of the pleasure it
has given me.
At this moment I am sitting within view of the wqods of
Saltram, with only the river Laira between us — that Saltram,
of whose Titian we have spent hours in talking, at dear old
Brixton. I have for the first time by daylight seen the streets of
Plymouth, through which you must so often have walked with Mrs.
Calvert ; and have enjoyed several distant peeps at Mount Edge-
cumbe, where it was, if memory fail not, that the relentless Archer
first transfixed your heart. I have caught glimpses of the noble
Tamar for some miles, before alighting at Saltash, with the dark
woods of the castle which pleasure-parties go to see from Plymouth,
with rich valleys beyond, closed by the desolate but, to me, inviting

2i2 THE LETTERS OF
Dartmoor ; coming on by boat from Saltash to Plymouth, and
getting a most significant hint of the strength of our navy.
What an interesting place is Plymouth ! There can be no end
of variety in the walks about it. Such an interchange of land and
water ; the ocean, the harbour, the arsenal, the busy hum of men ;
the most retired dells, the richest orchards and most sequestered
lanes and valleys ; the mountain streams tumbling over the granite
of the moors ; everything which may rouse, cheer, soothe, tranquillize
the spirits ; a combination seldom, I should think, to be met with
elsewhere. Really, with reverence be it spoken, I must call it a bit
of perverseness in you to number Paddington among the four
" beautiful cities," after living at Plymouth. What end is answered
by confounding light with darkness — the omnibus office with
Mount Edgecumbe, and Kilburn Road with the "thunder fraught"
Hamoaze ?
I have been thinking much lately of the shortness of life ; and
when I passed through your youthful haunts and " ancient neigh
bourhood," every turn of which seemed to speak to me of you and
Mrs. Calvert, I could not help remembering how great and import
ant an addition to the happiness of my little life had been your
united friendship. Memory would be much impoverished if she
were robbed of Brixton, and grief in its bitterest anguish would
have been still less bearable, but for your late sympathy and
vividly-remembered kindness. From first to last — in youthful
spirits, in toil, in adversity, in bereavement, you have both given
me the best proofs of friendship ; and I lament that untoward
circumstances have not afforded me an opportunity of evidencing
gratitude. .... I long to hear of our dear young friend who is upon
the ocean, and when you get a letter we must have an evening
over it. But first we must have a Plymouth night, and go over ali
the old ground again. I asked to be shown the Athenaeum, but
could not get a sight of it. I meant the Plymouth debating
society which we used to talk of. I shall start D.v., early to
morrow morning for Collumpton, which seemed very rich from the
railway going down ; and then homewards, by one puff of steam,
in about a week hence or earlier, to your fourth " beautiful city."
The north Cornish coast is very wild, but the country above
treeless and desolate. There is one most curious place on the

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Pete Point, Lands End.

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Study of Sea, Cornwall.

SAMUEL PALMER. 213
peaks of two cliffs, which are gradually tumbling by huge
fragments into the sea, viz. Tintagel Castle, the birth-place and
palace of King Arthur. It was a mouldered ruin in the days of
Henry the Eighth. Some turreted fragments which remain are
very quaint and strange. I found the people, as you said, very
human and civilized ; spending a very pleasant week in a lone
cottage among the hills, close to a rocky, sea cove. The goat was
milked in the kitchen, and two pigs always came up to be scratched
the wrong way of the bristles. It seems with them a pleasure
equivalent to honours and titles among mankind .... Ever, my
dear Sir, Affectionately Yours, SAMUEL Palmer.

1.856
XIV. To Miss Louisa Twining.
6, Dul-ro Pl.ACt, Victoria Road, August, 1856.
My DEAR Madam. Having spent a fortnight in the country,
where some friends live, I came back to the floods, and have
since been enjoying Kensington coast scenery from my windows!
I am ver)- sincerely gratified to hear that you enjoy your
copy. Remember that the brush is sometimes to be used wet,
sometimes half dry — sometimes in a point, sometimes spread.
The same may be said of the sponge. Get a piece with an angle
in some part of it ; then it will act on large or small portions ; but
do not depend upon it : work as if you had no such resource.
When, by practice, you get the clue to processes which seem
mysterious, you will perceive that the right process is always the
most simple that can be devised, relatively to the end proposed.
A cedar and chestnut are just the best trees you could be
employed upon. Do make them as like as you can. But when the
drawing is settled, then work upon them only at that time of day
when they have the light and shade you have selected as the best.
Trees are sometimes very grand and solemn when there is no
positive sun-light. It is well to get the layers or plates of foliage
rather over than under defined at first, but always with a feeling of
gradation. The kind of teacher you want is most difficult to find, and I do
not at present : remember one, but will be sure to let you know

2i4 THE LETTERS OF
should anything occur to me. The very best thing I can think of
is, in the meantime, to set the Teddington young ladies going
yourself. Whatever may be their ultimate choice, let them by all
means begin with the figure.
Gruner's Raffaelle's Bible, will make a bold beginning. If your
published works are there, let them try some of the best defined
figures with an H.B. pencil, and afterwards ripen the outlines with
pen and ink. In short, anything which will soonest give the
power of correct outline. This, according to the mental constitu
tion of the pupil, will, in the acquisition, prove either a pleasure or
a trouble ; but it must be done, and so the sooner the better.
If this could but be accomplished while pupils are young, so
that they could readily draw the outline of any object set before
them, it would simplify the whole future process ; and then
occasional lessons from the best masters would keep them right ;
and if they worked diligently, they could get some periodical
criticism upon the amount of their intermediate labours. Outline
requiring constant thought and comparison I think very young
people should not sit at it too long together. You might try two
half hours with a short rest between, letting them go on for the
whole hour if so disposed ; making this the invariable rule, to
secure daily practice, and letting them do as much more as they
feel disposed for.
It seems to me that a great secret of early education is not to
overrate the powers of attention in children. If they go to a
church, for instance, where there are long sermons, I should let
them have scripture history, or lives of the Saints full of pictures,
to be administered during the latter half of the discourse, rather
than knuckle their ribs or prick them with pins, to make them
" attend to what the gentleman says."
Your own powers of attention are far above the ordinary
standard, yet even you were wandering a little when you set your
palette ; hence these cracks. Make the setting of your palette a
morning's work, and you will save time in the end. Keep it well
replenished, for I mentioned the method. It is this. Before
laying any pigment for good upon the palette, put a rather full
touch, dry, upon a piece of drawing-paper. When quite dry, it
should have a slight gloss, but should not look at all dead : this
secures its right effect upon the drawing. Then, to secure the

SAMUEL PALMER. 215
palette and the facility of getting the colour off with the brush,
try if you can move it somewhat from the paper (I mean move it
somewhat about upon the paper) with a brush clipped in water. If
it dissolve and work about tolerably quite as much as you would
wish it to do in your drawing), it is right, and not likely to tear up
the palette:1 if it does not, add a little honey, till it dries of the
right consistency. Perhaps also, it would be well to lay, very
thinly, a little honey upon the palette first and let it set, before
laying on the pigments ; and if you want to lay your palette by for
any time, a little diluted honey laid over each colour might tend
to keep them moist. Perhaps flies out of doors might be attracted
by the honey, and they are such lovers of art that it is impossible
to keep them from it.
At Subiaco a nest of wasps swarmed about me, crawling about
my face and spectacles, and eating little clean, round holes into the
oil-paint, as I laid it on ; but never having, on any consideration,
left off a sketch from external annoyances, I persevered to the
end ; only moving my arm and hand very gently, as I knew they
were insects full (as the novelists say) of " just pride and proper
spirit ;" and by respecting their heroic instincts, I came off unstung.
Reflections in water are rather changeable, so I would recom
mend making studies on tinted paper, where you have the
advantage of the white for the glittering light ; getting it as soon
as you can, while it lasts, with crayons and black and white chalk ;
and afterwards if it remain, or any part of it, you may go on with
water-colours as much as you like ; but slight sketches themselves
are most useful to those who carry on their studies as far as I
suspect you will. When you have not time for anything but a
pencil line, write the leading particulars and try to understand the
leading phenomena. Beware of the notion that shadows cannot
be cast upon water. It is, I believe, true of a perfect mirror, but
when is water such ? I lately saw the shadow of a pier cast upon
the sea, and its colour thereby totally altered by losing the warm
sunlight, and reflecting to the eye only the blue of the sky above.
I think these are the leading points. 1. Water as a mirror,
reflecting sun, moon, sky, landscape &c. 2. Water reflecting to
the eye its local colour, taking cast shadows, obscuring the ground,
weeds, &c. by its intervention. 3. Water as in different degrees a
[' The palette referred to here, was of wood, with a white oil priming. — Ed.]

216 THE LETTERS OF
transparent substance, showing objects beneath it. The brilliant
sunshine on beds of gravel, shining up to the eye through water, is
a great beauty. Water varnishes, if I may so speak, everything it
covers. Pray let me hear of your proceedings from time to time, and I
will write at all events a line in cases of difficulty. Believe me
dear Madam, Your faithful Servant, S. Palmer.

1858
To Mr. John Reed.
6, Douro Place, W., January 26, [1858].
My DEAR Reed. Planets and systems rolling through millions
upon millions of miles of dark, empty space are dismal matters
to think on, and repulsive to our human feelings, as crushing man
and his concerns into less than a point — an atom. Whereas the
Torso Belvidere is more truly sublime than an infinity of vacuum ;
and the Sistine Chapel, as an inspiration from the Spirit of
Wisdom, than any of the material wonders of the universe. It is
the work of God upon mind, which must needs excel His working
upon matter, as the subject is greater, although the Infinite
Wisdom the same. I have long believed that these vast astro
nomical spaces are real to us only while we sojourn in the natural
body, and that the soul which has put on immortality will, so
far as soul can be cognisant of space, find itself larger than the
whole material universe.
How easily can the Divine Will annihilate, for a given time
and purpose, the " laws," as we call them, of matter. Our blessed
Lord although " clothed upon " with His resurrection body, came
and stood in the midst of the disciples, " the doors being shut."
" The Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip," and he " was found
at Azotus." And we find that the most powerful agents in the world of
matter itself, are those which seem least to partake of material
solidity. The electric fluid blasts the oak and shivers the battle
ment ; and to this subtile fluid and the elasticity of steam, we owe
the two inventions which have abridged space and almost anni
hilated time. Probably the spirits of "just men made perfect,"

SAMUEL PALMER. 21 7
have no impediments of space and time to sunder them ; and if
the planets of this and other systems be the " main- mansions "
of our Father's house, there may perhaps be no difficult)- or delay
of communication between them. The rush of the- autumnal
meteor may be a snail's pace compared with the motive Will
of interplanetary travellers.
At present however, after all the railways have done for us,
the case is very different, as engagements of one kind or other
leave us with time too little even to avail of the express train :
and thus it is with me, or I would certainly have run down to
see you long ere this. It is not enough to have you in my heart,
for I want to see your face, and feel the warmth of your smile ;
or the warmth of your scolding, if / happen to smile on certain
occasions when you think I ought to look very severe indeed !
But thank you most cordially for your sincerity. You are one of
the very few who seem to care for my soul, and what kindness
is comparable with that ? I enjoyed much the paper you just sent
me — all but the Chinese affair.1 To say nothing of the massacre
of an innocent populace, is it not like a big boy insulting a little
one ? Is this the first time that, on the shores of China, our
commercial greediness has played the fortune-hunting bully ?
Saul slew his thousands, David his ten thousands, but the
lust of gain its millions. Burke, speaking on the East Indian
Bill, describes Lahore as exhibiting for years, an unintermitted
but alas unequal struggle between the goodness of God to re
plenish, and the wickedness of man to impoverish and destroy.
I can sympathize with your fatigue after " many parties,"
having been obliged to go to several myself very lately. The
night after one of these meetings with really fine pianoforte
playing and Italian music, Mrs. P. read me George Herbert's life,
which, though I had often read it before, was better than a dozen
of these midnight dissipations. Cards and music are the great
destroyers of conversation. If I were an absolute monarch and
wanted to clench the people in a hopeless tyranny, I would take
off the duty on cards, and have thousands of reams of cheap
music at every stationer's. A poor soul enervated by opera music,
cares neither for itself nor its country.
Think of English daughters and English mothers, squalling
P Possibly the bombardn.ent of Canton. — Ed.]

218 THE LETTERS OF
voluptuous love bravwas, while the household and the nursery are
left to the tender mercies of hirelings !
Talking thus of parties, I must make an exception to some
occasionally given by artists. Artists have a good deal of real
humour in them, and see the point of a joke better than most
people 
What poor, fun-loving babies we are — here, just upon the verge
of eternity. All is a puzzle and heterogeneous heap of incon
sistencies so wild and strange that, but for their daily experience,
they would be incredible.
Thousands lavishing, thousands starving ; intrigues, wars,
flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements,
exhaustion, dissipation, death — and giddiness and laughter, from
the first scene to the last.
I remain, dear Reed, Yours affectionately, S. P.

tVI. To Miss Wilkinson. 6, Douro Place, May, 1858.
Dear Miss Wilkinson. I have taken the earliest moment,
after all sorts of bustles and engagements, to see about your
drawings. . . . As there is plenty of time before the Manchester
Exhibition, I wish you would write a line to say whether you still
wish to sell the Florence, for it gives so good a notion of the old
sombre, delightful place, that, unless you have a duplicate, I think
you may regret not having kept it as a memorial of your visit.
Why do you persist in using that rough paper on which the
Roman study is done, for delicate architectural details ? It is fit
only to play artistic, or rather ?*«artistic tricks upon, and rasps
both eye and mind like a great, coarse file. How much better to
make the textures and qualities. As to trees, if there be a time
suitable to begin your study of them, it is surely winter or early
spring, when their bones are not too encumbered with muscle.
One might draw the cypresses in the Villa D'Este for a year and
not exhaust them. There are some good ones too at a villa a
short ride from Rome. I forget the name.
You must have been much pleased with Mr. Glenny's beautiful
drawings, which are now on the screens at our Gallery.
If you fall in with our excellent, kind friend, Mr. Dessoullavy,

SAMUEL PALMER.

-I'J

please give our kindest remembrances. Mentioning my name, I
have no doubt he would be happy to show you his pictures.
I am too much of a stay-at-home to tell you any news
artistic or otherwise, and have no doubt you get it all long before
it reaches me. If I were asked for the best art advice I could
possibly give to lovers of sketching, I should say what Joseph
John Gurney said to a young man in whose welfare he took an
interest, " If you wish to succeed, give your whole mind to one
thing at one time." If your subject is more than a mile distant,
ride to it. If you tire the body, the mind will not have fair play.
Turner had a list of the implements he was to take with him, and
wisely added " myself," well knowing that it was better to forget
some of his colours, than not to take the whole man to the work.
It is very difficult really to imitate anything, and the outside of
nature, if ever so well imitated, is merely a shell ; or like the outer
most lemon in the childrens' lemon toy, the innermost of which,
in a bean-sized lemon, contains cups and spoons. Now, in tree
drawing, many an artist has got two deep in his lemon, some three
deep, some few, four deep ; but among the landscape-painters, only
Claude Lorraine has got at the cups and spoons. I remain, dear
Miss Wilkinson, Yours most truly, S Palmer.

XVII. To Miss Wilkinson.
[Kensington, September 17, 1858.]
Dear Miss Wilkinson. I cannot at present answer your letter
as it deserves, having sent it to Mrs. Palmer in the country, but I
have before me a little abstract of its business contents in my
commonplace-book, about which I may say a word or two, the
matter having no sequence, which you will excuse.
You say you cannot embody a scene. No one can. That is
the work of a Picture. A sketch can but make an abstract of
some qualities. It is well when they are the most characteristic.
Nor can you "go alone without some advice." Then imagine
what they would say whose judgment you value. I have found
this useful to myself; as also writing in cases of nicety, which
I always practise. It forces us to think clearly. . . . For
sunsets I would try a pencil or chalk outline on brownish-grey

220 THE LETTERS OF
paper, tinted with soft crayons, and sometimes explained by
writing on the parts themselves, or referring at bottom by
A. B. C. &c, to parts so lettered. Sunsets are full of drawing ;
and the tints, without the peculiarities of form and texture, will not
go very far. The Pincian Hill is a great battlefield for sunsets,
and I think they are fine, off and on, through the winter. . . .
I am afraid, as you say, there is " no chance " of my coming
to Rome, although I wish to see the southern vintages again, and
am attempting one or two haunting memories of my travels.
As a man, Rome is of course the attraction, but I am speaking
artistically. Were I to go again, I would make hundreds of
outlines of those rock-lifted cities on hills, from different points
of view ; some near, with strange antique gates, and mule-step
road up to them ; or a gentler incline, up which white oxen with
bended necks drag the vintage wain. What a quantity of
sketching matter turns up in near objects about every village.
I think by far the quickest way of sketching is upon brownish
paper, rather deep, for you are not afraid, as on white paper,
to score out your lines with the black chalk ; then heightening with
white chalk, and tinting here and there with crayons, using yellow
for instance just to discriminate trees or grass from buildings
&c, you get almost in the same time something more explanatory
than with pencil in a sketch-book of white paper. . . .
I really do not see how book illustrations can possibly be
managed in the midst of interruptions. When you want as much
expression as possible with as little labour, the mind usurps all
that can be spared the fingers ; and it will not do, just when you
are turning a line on which the subject hinges, to be snatched up by
a friendly foraging party for a ride to a flower-show, or an Exeter
Hall spouting match ! I do not mean that you frequent the arena
of those spiritual gladiators, but merely name the Hall, as one
of the London shows. I believe that, literally, ten minutes of close
attention do more for a drawing than a day of semi-distraction.
I heard at my printer's the other day, that a first-rate hand bit
in a little etching for a lady, with not much work in it, for seven
shillings. He would also lay the ground. As it is so cheap, and
as etching is so perfect a material, I think it would be best to try
that. ... If you get the ground laid and the etching bitten for
you, there will be no uncertainty. Neither you nor I could

SAMUEL PALMER. 221
bite it with certainty. Mine is a scramble of uncertainties from
beginning to end. Yours must be neat and precise, with a sort of
light, vignette elegance. I trust I can give you really copious
information concerning the theory of etching, having lately added
to my stock and, as I recommend, WRITTEN IT.
How delightful it must be to get out and sit, as you describe,
at the top of the house. I wish we could all do it in Douro Place,
for the sake of the skies (smoked though thev be), and for the air,
lifted a little more above the drains ; but both you and I would like
an easier mode of access than you have probably seen achieved
from the front attic of No. 6, by an aspiring student, vvho this day,
September 17th, went for the first time to the grammar-school, and
into the highest class. They have a capital head master now,
which I was waiting for.
I do wish I had some news to tell you, but when you so kindly
lent me The Times ever)- day, I got such a stock into my poor
head that I fear it will never hold any more. My newspaper is
the Crystal Palace. There alone, we beat the whole world, ancient
and modern, in treasures of all climes and ages. I took More
there the other day, to give him a fill of music. There is music
of one kind or other all the time. There was I, drinking in, so far
as a half-civilized Englishman could, the wondrous beauties of The
Funeral Genius, The Torso, The Ariadne, The Polyhymnia, while
from the distant, great organ, sweet streams of melody spread like
perfume through the halls. But for the Crystal Palace, I should
heartily pity all who return hither from beautiful Italy. Of course
I am talking the talk of the " natural man " — the old Adam. But
however I may practise, I know better than to suppose that a
Christian ought to seek his own happiness here (or a philosopher
either), for to run after it is to lose it. Happiness is too swift-
footed for us. We can never overtake her, but in the straight
path of duty she will overtake us. There is a path (Alas, that
I should be unworthy even to write of it), at the end of which
martyrdom itself is but a goodly tree blushing with rose and
amaranth ! " Another time looking out of his windowe to beholde
one Mr. Reynolds, a religious, learned, and vertuous Father of Sion,
and three monkes of the Charterhouse going forth of the Tower to
their execution, ... Sir Thomas, as one that longed to accom-
panie them in that journey, sayde to his daughter, then standing

222 THE LETTERS OF
besides him : ' Loe, doest not thou see, Megg, that these blessed
Fathers be now as chearefully going to death, as if they were
bridegroomes going to be married ? Whereby, good daughter, thou
maist see what a great difference there is betweene such as have in
effect spent all their daies in a straight, hard, and penitentiall life
religiously, and such as have in the world like worldlie wretches
(as thy poore father hath donne) consumed all their time in pleasure
and ease licentiously ? ' " 1 What a high ladder is that of Christian
perfection ! This humble penitent was no other than that model
of Christian laymen, the blessed Sir Thomas More. The Charter
house monks remind me of Camaldoli, about three miles from
Naples. From the end of their garden is perhaps the finest
prospect in the world. Ladies, of course, cannot enter ; but if you
could see the enchantment anywhere outside the walls, it would be
worth while climbing the hill on hands and knees for it ! Thence
I saw the sun dip into the Mediterranean. There, Mr. Etty found
among those happy hermits (for they do not live in cloisters, but in
separate huts), some " who " (to use his own words) " loved learning
for its own sake," not with the mental harlotry which loves learning
for the sake of its scholarships, and fellowships, and canonries and
bishoprics !
But I begin to be in earnest, which is very ungentlemanly ; and
therefore it is time that I remain (that is, that what in 'me remains
cool and discreet and fit for " good society," should remain), dear
Miss Wilkinson, Ever yours truly, S. PALMER.

XVIII. To Miss Louisa Twining.
Kensington, October 28, 1S58.
Dear Miss Twining  I forgot to congratulate you
on having been able to attend the meeting on Social Science to
which you made so valuable a contribution last year. In my
humble opinion, Social Science is worth all the other sciences put
together, in the largeness of its working ; and indeed it is the great
preliminary science ; for, to the thousands who are left half-paid
and housed like swine, knowledge presents only a lamp which
glares upon their own wretchedness.
[1 More's Life of Sir Thomas More. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 22;
But I suppose the avowed principle of Free Trade, " Buy as
cheap and sell as dear as you can," must work itself out until tin-
"day of visitation," which an untoward combination of second
causes such as the failure of the cotton crop, a bad harvest, a panic,
and such like, occurring together, may bring about when least
expected, I remain, dear madam, Yours ver)- truly, S. Palmer.
1859
XIX. To Thomas Moke Palmer.
Hastings, June, 1859.
My DEAR MORE. A man with no aliud age re is, as you say,
likely to be a mere animal ; but so far as his worldly interests are
concerned, he is often a very efficient animal. I allude to what are
called " the plodders who get on."
A first-rate man is one who has taken quite as much pains as
the plodder to attain excellence in some one thing, and has done
that all the better for his general curiosity and varied information.
The danger with young men is this, that general knowledge — a
superficial smattering of many things is a much easier affair than
first-rate excellence in any one thing ; it does not call out those
peculiar energies and that discriminating refinement of judgment
which can alone arise from a grapple with some one worthy subject.
As to a livelihood, concentration is all important. Where
there are so many competitors there must be genuine excellence
to ensure (D.V.) a slice of the bread and cheese which society deals
round to the workers. We can work only according to our
strength, but so far as that reaches, the great thing is to do our
very best.
Emerson says, " Genius is patience." 1 Patience and painstaking
are indispensable to high excellence. When you have the hap
piness to know any one who is first-rate in his way, you will
find him, like Mr. Brown, [now head master of Charterhouse]
harping upon " accuracy and elements " " elements and accuracy."
This is what gives position in life. More or less of this defines
the income and prospects of the scholar — makes the difference
between the head master and the usher. There are much higher
views of the subject, but I will now close my sermon.
t1 According to Lord Beaconsfield the saying is Buffon's. See Tancred.— Ed.]

224 THE LETTERS OF
. . I am glad to hear you have the Beethoven, and the more
so, as it is a work complete in itself. I did not think the microscope
scheme bad. I doubt whether even upon the back of "a flea as
big as a mastiff," you could hop quite so far as into the invisible
world. You will best do that, by watching your heart morally as
well as physically. " Keep thy heart with all diligence ; for out of
it are the issues of life " ; and alas, alas, of death also, the physical
again, being a true type of the moral.
But to return. The microscope would have been used compara
tively seldom ; the music will (D.V.) very often amuse you. But do
mind to secure your present great opportunity of being a good
classic. It is far too great a thing to be done by halves ; and
unfortunately, if we become but half-people, the halves will not
become wholes, like those of the polypus.
How grand must be the Gregorian music at All Saints', with
such an organ ! Were I young again, I should like to sing in that
choir. How happy must Sir Thomas More have felt (laying aside
the Chancellor's gown on Saturday) to don the chorister's surplice
next day in old Chelsea Church, where, if you remember, we have
before now worshipped together. " Blessed are they that dwell in
thy house : they will be still praising thee."
In architecture, in music and the other arts, in society, in the
different intellectual orders of men, you are now seeing a great
variety. When we rise in thought by steps and stages from the
trifling to the sublime, we scarcely perceive how far they are
asunder ; but put them side by side, and they are like " Pop goes
the weasel" on a cracked fiddle compared with the Gregorian
choir at All Saints'.
If you come across any one who talks very freely about other
people and laughs at them, do remember, if only from prudential
motives, that to one who has his way to hew through the world
such a habit is absolute suicide. Such a habit is both hateful and
treacherous ; treacherous because the material of ridicule and
scandal is often filched from its very victims in the confidence of
social intercourse — perhaps under their very roof! While we listen
to such tattle we are ourselves, perhaps, furnishing material for
amusement at our expense. Nasty things are sometimes done by
otherwise very nice people. Hence the danger. We should try to
embody in ourselves a portion of each good thing we see among

SAMUEL PALMER.

225

our friends, and so, as we roam, collect honey everywhere. The
fly, unlike the bee, settles with satisfaction on even- little heap of
filth and refuse. Sometimes there is a good ileal of droller)- and
even wit mixed up with what is wrong, and that makes it the mon
dangerous. .... It seems to me, that all the eminent and considerable-
men have laid up -while young a large stock of solid knowledge,
which they have afterwards embellished by eloquence and fancy.
But they had to make their ginger-bread before they could gild it.
In light literature, think how much must go to make a book like
The Caxtons. I do not allude to quotations, but to the texture of
the general fabric. You may get your " trimming" from books of
reference, but the wool or the silk must be homespun.
If you have time to write a letter of decent length, like the
last, I should be glad of it. Incidents and adventures are pleasant.
When you have something to tell, and feel that you should like
to tell it, here I am.
Let me advise you amidst all you meet with, gay or grave,
pleasant or irksome, to remember that there is also RIGHT and
WRONG — never to forget that ; and that whatever present satis
faction many of the blessings of Providence throw in our way
gratis, yet, as Mr. Brown quotes to you, " Nil sine viagno vita
labore dedit mortaiibus/' I remain, dear More, Your affectionate
father, S. PALMER

XX. To Miss Louisa Twining.
6, Douro Place, December, i860.
Dear Miss Twining. Allow me to thank you for the
pamphlet containing your powerful address on the work-house
schools, which surely it is the interest as well as the duty of the
guardians to render as effective as possible ; for anything which
makes the poorhouse depauperizing must tend to lower the rates.
A low view of the subject, but interest is a capital lever when
goodness moves it. But when interest is blind as well as cruel,
we almost wish for a despotic government which can devise and
execute great designs without paltry interference. Would that you
were the despot of the Unions for the next three years ! Q

226 THE LETTERS OF
But for the spendthrift war, think what might have been
done with the taxes we have been paying through the last half-
century. A country rich and unembarrassed, gracious and wise in
council might, by massive combinations, make its work-houses
and prisons self-supporting, and put them into real antagonism
with destitution and with crime. A grand educational institute
might be open to rich and poor, and the traditional thousands of
Oxford be no more incredible.
Instead of this, we have, as the ballad says, "gone to fight
the French for king George upon the throne," while matters of
highest moment have been stinted and tight — cracked, patched, and
cobbled in our treatment of them, for want of largeness of purpose
and singleness of purpose, and national funds. Still there is left
what, under God, has ever been the main-spring of great movements,
individual energy ; hampered it is true in a thousand ways, harassed
by opposition, or " encumbered by help," yet finally victorious.
The world's true heroes have fought after a strange fashion ;
battering their way through difficulties with the very chains that
bound them. I think your Cause is the more noble because it is
not ambitious. It aims at no romantic results, and presents no
theatrical contrasts. It has its dealings with those who are not
" reckoned among the nations " ; it soothes the dying beds of those
who have long been dead to society. Yet perhaps from these very
schools that you are labouring to reform there may arise through that
reform, some great and good man, in himself alone (could you look
into futurity), an ample reward for anything you may do or suffer.
And if not, is it nothing to " turn many to justice " ? — the direct
result of a plain, practical, Christian education. From one who is
doing so much for children, it is instructive to hear A FEW
WORDS about them.
While ladies say that they can't trust their servants with their
keys, we see that they can trust them with their children : trust them
at the most impressible age to take their shape and bent of mind
and soul from hirelings ! What then is the momentous business
that can drag the mother from those dearest hours of her life, her
mornings with her children ? No business at all ! You have an
swered the question. It is the hatred of conscientious painstaking
in which and through which alone comes the delight of duty. The
well is deep and the wheel is heavy which fetches up the living

SAMUEL PALMER. 227
waters of comfort. Even the sea-monsters draw forth nourishment
to their young ; but where arc these genteel motheisof ours— what
are they about in these precious morning hours, with the bodies and
souls of four or five children in the hands of the young lady from
whom they lock their tea-caddy? Not surely making morning
calls, or sight-seeing, or busy with the last new novel ! One of the
old-fashioned nurses was worth a hundred of such mothers. To
my dear nurse I owe the first movements of poetic impulse. Well
do I remember, while the long shadows of moonlight were stealing
over an ancient room, her repeating from Dr. Young : —
" Fond man, the virion of a moment made,
Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade ! "
Often do I read in her well-handled but clean-kept Milton, given
me on her death-bed.
When a man tends upward, he moves towards the cherubic
state, that of hallowed intelligence. A woman moves, I really
believe, towards something still higher — seraphic love. When they
tend downwards, the man falls towards brutality, the woman towards
trumpery. Toys and trumpery, filigree and finery, with an in
sufferable dash of morbid sentimentalism, make an odious compound,
for which indeed the poor children might profitably exchange the
honest ministration of one of those old-fashioned nurses.
Do write a companion little book called The Mother s Morning :
or Self-denial re-warded.
I do not believe there is any solid, enduring pleasure which
does not walk hand in hand with self-denial. Nay more ; we may
say that the peculiar pleasures of any duty or study — that its
deepest, highest joys can be tasted only in conflict with its sorest
difficulties. So, in the work of early education ; but then it may
plausibly be said, how few mothers will be sufficient for these
things ! Not so however, for it seems that, besides the general
measure of mental power, the Almighty has added an instinctive
sagacity for the fulfilment of natural duties ; and I think wc sec
this in the mother very strongly, when not perverted by folly. It
is her patience and tenderness in the first reading lessons which
make the sight of a book pleasant to a little child. Led by the
mother's hand, Wisdom's ways are ways of pleasantness. Not
so when a crinolined nurse, installed as pedagogue, shouts out,
drowning the nursery roar — " Now master 'Gustus, I've called you
Q 2

228 THE LETTERS OF
twenty times to come and say your task, and I'm blest if I don't
tell your 'Pa when he comes home, and no mistake about it !"
This is our early education !
We think ourselves civilized !
Perhaps we may happen to have heard of another civilized
nation where all who could afford it kept in the house a master
of morals and manners, who was the children's companion every
where who took them to and from the public school, and taught,
or strove to teach them justice.
These were Pagans. We call ourselves Christians !
Pray forgive all this garrulity. From a favourite subject or a
sore subject it is difficult to abstain, and education with me
is both. If these loose, hasty words move you to write a little book, I
shall not have been foolish in vain.
I see it as in a vision — the good mother in her nursery ; the
good mother walking out with her children : a whole bevy of nurses
and under-nurses if she please, but still the mother there.
And now, out of breath as I am with my own cackling, believe
me, dear Madam, Yours most truly, S. PALMER.

1861
XXI. To Mr. John Reed. [Kensington.]
My dear Reed  I must make a sudden transition to
the house subject. The soil is all right, but DO make thorough
research as to the drainage, upon which the health of every member
of a family depends  Next to process in connection with
colouring, drainage seems to me the most intricate, endless
difficulty ; because builders go by receipt and don't master the
principles of the unsavoury, or I should rather say, most savoury
and sanitary science.
And now let me, ere I forget to write what I certainly do not
forget to desire, wish you and yours, so far as domestic trials will
permit, a merry Christmas and most happy new year ; as happy
as any of us can find it in their hearts to be, forming part of the
. . . grand climacteric of a great country, and elbowed as we

SAMUEL PALMER. 22<)
are on the one side by exuberant wealth, and on the other by
ghastly destitution. Which state of things, Lord Bacon tells us,
has betokened the ruin of great nations. Wc go to the clever ones
and they are at fault. Those who are knowing in overs-thing but
human nature may possibly be so far deluded as to expect a
panacea through universal education. It is indeed a delightful
dream, and the resources which knowledge opens up tend to keep
people out of mischief as to their general habits, but to make them
the more powerful for mischief when so disposed. Take the present
London as it is ; assure to the children and descendants of every
unit of those millions a good, plain education at least. Well, no
doubt the boon would be inestimable ; but would it create a pure,
peaceful, self-denying, charitable future ? Are not the most
educated people the farthest removed from each other in opinions
and belief. Are not thousands of the best educated people back
bone protestants, and hundreds of the same Vatican papists ? Or,
I might say, thousands ; for whereas the thinly scattered ruins of
our old monasteries were, fifty years ago, visited principally perhaps
for their beauty, but also as curiosities and something outlandish
and obsolete, there are now it is said one hundred monasteries, or
such like institutions in this our protestant England.
Well ! But if education can't make people agree, does not
it make them tolerant and loving? Give them a month's
provisions, and shut up Dr. Manning and Lord Shaftesbury in a
lonely tower, and see !
Milton and Locke were well educated, and far advanced as any
of ourselves in the love of civil liberty, and yet both of them taught
that the Roman Catholic worship should be prohibited. If then
education will not make men either think alike or tolerate each
other's disagreement, whence are we to expect the final victory over
physical or moral evil — the everlasting kingdom of light, and grace,
and love ? How will it be inaugurated ? Probably when He who
rules and actuates matter as well as spirit permits some disruption
beneath the sea, letting its waters into one of those vast volcanic
regions which extend thousands of miles, and lie beneath the sea.
Then the steam, suddenly generated, will blow everything to
pieces that lies above it ; and as to devouring fire, every one knows
that it has as it were honey-combed the under surface, and is only
restrained till He shall say the word in mercy, that out of the ruins

230 THE LETTERS OF
and ashes of these sinful and incurable ages, He may create a new
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
Any apathy we find concerning our blessed Lord's second
coming is, I think, little to be wondered at. Why should modern
Christians who are well-to-do in the world, and take pains to make
themselves comfortable, like to be disturbed ? The old Heavens
and earth have done well enough for them ; and though the whole
creation does groan in pain together until now, they will feed
their poodles upon chicken, and give away some blankets at
Christmas !
Believe me, with kindest regards to Mrs. Reed, and kisses to
the dear little ones, Ever yours affectionately, S. Palmer.
XXH. To Mr. Edward Calvert.
At James Linnell's, Esq., Red Hill, Surrey, July n, i85i.
My dear Calvert. As you are the frst of my friends whom
I sit down to make partaker of my sorrow, I will not wait for
black-edged paper, which is sent for.
You I take first, for you were first in kindness when dear little
Mary was called away, and your kind, kind heart will be wrung to
hear that at our lodging at High Ashes, near Dorking, on Leith
Hill, my darling Thomas More left us at a quarter to six. It
was effusion of blood on the brain.
I can write no more, dear Mr. and Mrs. Calvert, and do not
know where I shall be for the next few days. Broken-hearted,
I remain Your old, old friend, S. PALMER.
My poor wife is at High Ashes, where the dear fellow died.

XXIII. To Mrs. George.
[Reigate], November 2, 1861.
Dear Mrs. George. To-day the first snow has fallen upon
our dear boy's grave !
Is it not a comfort to find that his numerous manuscripts, and
the contents of his private desk meant for no eye to see, are as
unsullied as that driven snow ?
Yes ! he will lie to-night under his new winter shroud.
He whom his mother cherished so from his earliest infancy

¦Mi.

SA M I 'EL PA I MER. 23,
with every forethought and device of devoted tenderness, to see
him always fed with the best, and clothed with the warmest, has
left our fire-side where he should be sitting now, musing with
poetic ear on the westerly wind which is moaning to me, as I
write, direct from Abinger. But it has passed over his grave, and
seems to invite me thither, and to sing to me that we shall not
very long be parted !
There is no sensation in the grave, so it is a foolish fancy ; but
I have always felt it so vers- sad that, while -we are warm by our
winter fire-side, those precious limbs, mouldering though they be, of
our lost dear ones should be far away from us, unhoused and in
the damp, cold earth, under the wind, and rain, and frost. Thrice
happy those to whom the grave is a golden gate, and who know
that " though worms destroy this body," yet. in their flesh they
shall see God. . . . But what am I writing ? the snow has set me
off, for " I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i'
the cold ground." Believe me. Affectionately yours, S. PALMER.

XX IV. To Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist.
Park Lane, Reigate, December 9, 1861.
Dear Mrs. Gilchrist. The dreadful truth which was gradually
broken to me, I knew in full on Saturday. My Sunday will not
easily be forgotten.
Any expressions of sympathy must be inadequate — any of
consolation premature ; and so utterly taken by surprise, so shocked
and stunned as I have been by these dreadful tidings, what can
I say which will not be incoherent and distressing ?
Yet can I be quite silent ? I can feel some small comfort, while
grieving over your sorrow, from knowing that all the future of
your life must be more bearable than the present time, for life's
worst calamity is passed nor can I forget that it places you in a
new, a peculiar, and very near relationship to our Heavenly
Father, who has declared himself specially, " the God of the
Fatherless and the Widow."
Poor broken reed that I have been under my own sorrow, who
am I that I should essay to staunch a bleeding heart? I will not
attempt it, nor farther profane the sacredness of your grief.

232 THE LETTERS OF
Pray do not write, for it opens the wounds afresh, unless we
can in any way comfort you.
Ere the worst was told me, I thought I ought to come to you
and tender my help in nursing our dear, kind friend, but was so
poorly and shattered as to be quite unable to leave home.
I have just recovered from my own dreadful sorrow sufficiently
to see what these things should teach, and for what ineffable
blessedness they are meant to prepare us. They empty us of what
is most dear on earth, that we may " be filled with all the fulness
of God." Mysterious indeed are the permissions of Providence, and we may
say with the Prophet, " Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself
Lying still in His hand, may we say also with the Psalmist, "My
flesh and my heart faileth : but God is the strength of my heart,
and my portion for ever."
Believe me, dear Mrs. Gilchrist, Your grieved and affectionate
friend, S. Palmer. 1862
XXV. To Mrs. George.
[Reigate], March 10, 1862.
Dear Friend. Worthless otherwise than as a curiosity,
behold the handwriting of a real hermit. I always honoured
solitude, and it is grateful. My dear, kind books gather round me
in the evening, and in their sweet society I am as little miserable
as one can be who, in this world, must never more be happy.
We English people feel the domestic instinct at tea-time very
much, and would fain then see the family circle complete. The
magic chain is broken ! Well, the remaining links ? They are away ;
so I set a chair for "Trot " : up jumps poor puss, and between us
we make a segment of a circle, at all events. Even the dumb
creatures have gratitude and love in their measure, and the time
will come when we shall know that the sagacity which finds a new
planet is less essential to the perfection of our nature than gratitude
and love. " Trot," like her betters, has a pair of eyes — an eye of
love and an eye to the milk-jug. Like her betters, she purrs for
her milk — unlike many of them, she purrs afterwards.
Yes, our family circles and our friendly circles get broken, and

SAMUEL PALMER. 2U
like the poor spider, we hasten to mend the broken web. But the
spider beats us at this kind of work ; it is poor cobbling with us,
after all. My gallant barque has foundered, and now, like the
hunted witch, I " Sail in an egg-shell, make a straw my mast
A cobweb all my coil."
This is our state. These are our Facts, as old familiar friends and
some dearer than friends fall off — all our coil a cobweb !
Then comes the voice from Heaven, bidding us open our
eyes and see, and stretch out our hands undgrasp the ANCHOR
OF THE SOUL  Believe me, Affectionately yours,
S. Palmer. XXVI. To Miss Wilkinson.
Furze Hill House, May 29th, 1S62.
Dear Miss Wilkinson. Jacob told Pharaoh that his days
had been evil although Joseph was found. What must mine be
now ? Perhaps in mercy they may be made few ; therefore let my
words be few, and if possible useful to others — that is, in a very
humble way ; for aspirations, and poetic dreams, and even the
decent, moderate hope that a son might make amends for a father's
shortcomings, are no more. Still, I may perhaps not be wholly
useless if I can circulate little cookery receipts, or any — the most
insignificant hints which may help oil the creaking wheels of our
bodily life — hints jerked out in defiance of all style, or connection,
or elegance. Nay, as David said to his most decorous wife, " I will
be yet more vile," and at once suggest a FLEAFUGE (no useless
matter in Spain or Italy) in the shape of a great lump of camphor.
Any one who thinks it indelicate to say or write FLEA, on due
occasion, deserves to be most soundly bitten. Mosquitoes, I read,
may be banished by burning pieces of camphor the size of
a hazel-nut. Would that we had known it at Pompeii. I grieve to
think that you have again felt that difficulty of breathing. When
accompanied by obstruction in the throat, a few whiffs of tobacco
are sometimes most efficacious, not in the coarse shape of a cigar.
putting tobacco into the mouth, but through the rational and
refined medium of a CLAY PIPE. Clay is injurious to the lips,
therefore take a little thin paper, and gum it round the mouth end —
or, to be perfectly elegant, the oral end of the pipe.

234 THE LETTERS OF
I read with much interest and, I trust, not without improve
ment, your remarks on certain advantages which render advancing
years less depressing ; but here I have a sad advantage of you,
taking comfort in their very fewness. I hope and believe it will be
otherwise with you, when you have attained to my years ; though
before I was stricken down we had then this in common, not to be
without affliction ; and this, in moderate measure, is an essential
blessing. What a repulsive creature is a man who has had it all
his own way ! — -A creature without sense of social duty, who lives
to make himself comfortable. Men have puzzled themselves for
such a definition of their -species as should clearly separate the
inferior species. I will not attempt a definition, but hazard
this. A brute does what is pleasant, a man does, what is right.
No definition can be hammered out of this, for unfortunately
there are thousands of • two-legged brutes, and very good-natured
ones too, who live for the very purpose of doing what is
pleasant. I think all, rich and poor, should work — do something
useful, five hours a day at least. I am obliged to work, for I dare
not leave leisure for such a grief as mine. There is a time for
prayer and a time for sleep ; every other moment I am obliged to
snatch frorn the monopoly of grief. But seeing the face of a
friend does us much good ; and we seem for the moment cheerful
and merry, so that if we had the pleasure of seeing you here, I do
not think we should make you gloomy. Matter for sketching
abounds, even from the windows, and they say the sea air may be
smelt as it sweeps hither uninterrupted from - the Brighton downs
which bound our horizon.1
I am very glad to hear about your three drawings ; and, so far
as finished drawings are concerned, quite agree with you that they
cannot be too much finished, or rather let us say they cannot be
too much studied ; for the Word finish has come to have an evil
meaning, such as the attempting to paint what nobody ever saw,
every leaf on a tree — such as the drawing attention to the genera
and species of vegetation in the foreground of a landscape, which
no one strongly impressed with a beautiful scene would so much
[ ' In his occasional recommendations of the neighbourhood near Furze Hill to his
friends, my father may appear to have forgotten his old emphatic preferences. This was
far from being the case. His ideal of scenery was not to be found at or near Red Hill,
though it was approached, perhaps, by some of the exquisite country on the western
borders of Surrey. — Ed.]

.*.-¦</?. >-..«

SAMUEL PALMER. jj5
as notice. The art is, while thoroughly knowing the species, to
render them trul)-, lest the eye should be attracted by them
through fallacious drawing or colour — to give the lesser truth of
their own identity, governed by the greater truth of their relation
and subordination to the whole. No right line sufficiently ex
tended can pass through the centre of a sphere without touching
two points of polar opposition. Art is such a sphere. The best
artist, in some two points of his work, will give the extremes of
the definite and the indefinite if he can, and the lesser intensities
of both elsewhere. When, where, and how is a life's study, to be
helped by carrying in the pocket something like Reynolds's blot
book. " The indefinite half is the more difficult of the two," as
Millais said to me when we were looking at the Turner Gallery.
I never looked at the slight sediment at the bottom of a coffee-
cup without getting a lesson. When I think of a pocket sketch
book of soft printer's paper (plate-paper), a piece of charcoal, or
very soft chalk, and a finger to blend it about, I think of improve
ment — mastery. Towards the art of giving a completed look to
work, nothing helps more, I think, than the principle of emphasis
and gradation (like a comet) in the relief of masses ; and, if you
can, in every touch. This, with the polar quality of massive
opposition, distinguished Titian.
You doubt whether hasty sketches are of any use for improving
yourself. Quite agreeing with you as to what are usually called
hasty sketches, allow me to suggest that the art of completed work
is twofold. First the art of imitating what is before us with all its
detail (I am speaking of pictures done out of doors), which imita
tion represents nature asleep ; and secondly the knowledge of the
phenomena. These bring it to life. The latter can be treasured
up only by continual observation, and a little memorandum-book
and pencil carried always in the pocket. Often, the sketches must
be rapid, as the effect is momentary. Thus alone can the action
of moving figures be caught ; and the action and expression are
almost everything. They are best caught by single lines; [sketch]
then you can by the side of the line go on from recollection, and
then a little larger, with the light and shade, and writing the
colours of the draperies. At home you can draw it about three
inches high, unclothed, making use of an anatomical book or casts,
till the main masses are right, and proceed to lay on the drapery.

236 THE LETTERS OF
"[Sketch.] Of course the figure being draped in nature, you sketch
it so, but the lines of the limbs and body are the great things if
you can get nothing else. At home, when you design a figure for
introduction into your subject, after the first blot you should draw
it faintly, undraped, so as really to know what the action is, and
then add the dress. A little figure study always going on is of
golden use to the painter of landscape or architecture, and gives an
increased value, artistic and pecuniary.
Mr. Newman made me eight or ten of his cedar colour-boxes
without partitions, and a little deeper than usual, in which I possess
a fine sculpture-gallery, having filled them with casts from" the
finest antique gems. These are most useful for reference, when
working out lines caught from nature. I assure you there is
nothing far-fetched in this. All the best landscape-painters have
studied figures a great deal. Mr. Rogers used to prize a Claude
of his the more because the figure was painted by Claude himself.
I would advise you to collect casts from the best antique gems
whenever you can get them. The enamelled roundness of a
well-modelled figure is invaluable as a foreground. To tell you
all that is in my heart, I believe the two great parts of art to
be SENTIMENT and STRUCTURE. Under structure, be
ginning with human anatomy, I include all the organizations and
atmospheric or other visible phenomena of this material world
about us. If you say, " Who is sufficient for these things ? " I
can answer only with a groan. But we must do our best, at all
events apportioning our effort according to priority of claim
(securing what is most important first), and when we do not see
what to do — doing nothing till we have found out what is to be
done. Writing our difficulties ; which writing compels us to think
clearly of them, during which effort they will often vanish. Ab
horring " muddle " — abhorring half work, and preferring play ;
not working on after the attention is fatigued ; keeping by us a
lump of tangled string as a visible representation of " muddle,"
and stamping upon it every morning directly we put our shoes
on. We may hate and stamp upon "muddle," because it is not
a living being. It is the negative pole of sin ; and the Psalmist
exhorts those who love the Lord to " hate the thing which is
evil." I do not hate the Devil, though I fear him and hate his
doings, but I do hate muddle, hurry, indecision of purpose.

SAMUEL PALMER. 2 ;;
Pray beware of sun-strokes. Pray do not work too Ion-
together. Pray do not over-tire yourself, but avoid triflcrs and
morning callers, and take plenty of RKST and SLKl'T. \W-
lieve me, dear Miss Wilkinson, "Sours most ttulv, S. Palmkr.

XXVII. To Mr. C. W. Con..
Furze Hill House, Da-vn of June, 1S62.
My DEAR Cope. The sun has not yet risen upon the earth,
but unable to sleep, and thinking of my poor boy, I begin the
day's work by assuring you that though my lamp is " put out in
obscure darkness," I am not so envious as to be insensible to the
happiness of others, but vers- heartily congratulate you on your dear
wife's safe passage through her hour of trial, and on the birth
of another son. You must have been very glad of this, and
will have reason indeed for thankfulness if he grow up to resemble
his brother, whose progress at Oxford I sometimes picture to
myself, and seem to see him busy over his books in that snug,
quaintly-angled room he sketched for me from memory.
For me, the few dark months or years which ma)- remain are
the more distressing, as the work of a profession leaves so little time
for doing good — positive good to others. Perhaps, however, I
may do some good to you, if I can prevail upon you to come
and see a tract of land close by, where ground is yet to be bought.
It is not so high as to be bleak, yet commands a panorama :
the soil is sand, and it is reckoned as healthy a spot as is, or can
be. If the artists knew of it, it would soon be gone ; and a little
money invested there would be merely secured from the pockets of
the doctors. It is a plateau on the top of the sand hill close to Cock-
shot Mill — not half an hour's walk for you from Reigate Station,
whence it will soon be less than an hour from Charing Cross. There
are plenty of trees about, but it is just so lifted up above them
as to be perfectly dry, and open to the freest circulation of some of
the finest air in England. It is quite away from the dismal
sentiment of Red Hill, and close to the miniature Devonshire
dells of Lord Somers' Park. Altogether, there is a continuous
two miles run for the children along the hill-top. Those who do
not take snuff say they can smell the sea air which sweeps
without impediment from Brighton. Indeed, as James Linnell

238 THE LETTERS OF
was saying the other day, you may travel about England for
hundreds of miles without finding such a site for building.
The ground is dear, yet cheap for the situation, £400 an acre
(so I was told : it may be less) : now half an acre is sufficient, and
what a boon you would be conferring on your children if you were
to build a small house just to run down to yourself, and to send them
down to when out of sorts, or better, before they become so.
I should think it the very place for your dear Emily, because
of the dryness of soil, and sweet, genial quality of air, without any
approach to bleakness. By building on a plan which allows for
additions afterwards, you might have a house large enough to
begin with, and a painting-room of the right kind (glass at top,
and windows all round, closeable by shutters at pleasure), for five
or six hundred pounds, and the value of the property would be sure
to increase, for it is the only perfectly healthy tract yet unenclosed.
It is secluded too, not haunted like Hastings with open-air novel
readers. You will think I have studied under Mr. Robins, though
I have abstained from his crowning attraction, the "hanging
wood," which happily is unknown here.
Contrast this with the frightful environs of Wimbledon,
Hounslow, and the damp, reeking " Thames scenery" I where you
can't get along the towing-paths without treading into dead dogs ;
and remember that things are not likely to be flattered or seen
all rose colour, by Yours affectionately, The Most Unhappy OF
Men.
P.S. I admire your ground-plan, which gives very picturesque
angles. I have heard that the roof is great part of the expense
of a house, so perhaps the cheapest way would be to let the first
part built be under one simple roof, to which a corresponding
piece might be added afterwards.
A friend of mine, a clergyman, built himself a house here
(i.e. Hakewell designed it for him), which is extremely pleasing.
The plan is one long passage, with the large rooms on one
side, and the smaller on the other, [plan] * is the drawing-room.
I do not mean a room for drawing in, but a primitive, apostolic,
protestant drawing-room for the female apostle and "young
ladies," and some very handsome " devotional chairs," a grand
piano and other appliances tending to our English ideal of " Piety
without asceticism," "Rational piety" &c. &c. This is not

SAMUEL PALMER. 2 vi
intended to refer personally to my friend's house, or any living
clergyman's ; in fact it is far too humble to adumbrate the
splendour of the palatial mansions of many of the clergy. We
English are such a sensible people — so little given to fanaticism !
We know "where to stop " with a vengeance ! ! ! !
Every clergyman should have Butler's Lives of the Saints. () !
that such of the clergy as choose to deny themselves the whole of
ecclesiastical history between the Apostolic age and Luther, would
at least read Southey's life of Wesley ; just to see what curious
things a man does who is thoroughly in earnest. Of course
Southey dummyfies the rich points, and comes in like spoonfuls of
nauseous soda in a lemon pudding ; but still we can get at Wesley
through Southey. He f Wesley) was a real fanatic, like the glorious
men of all ages. On looking into the derivation of fanatic, I find
it ought to have a good meaning so far, rather than a bad. For a
real, wild treat, read St. Athanasius's life of St. Anthony.

XXVIII. To Mr. C. W. Cope.
Furze Hill House, June 21, 1862.
My dear Cope. I have twice looked at the land since writing
to you, and think that if on the whole it is probable that you
may build some day a place to run down to, and send detachments
of your family, then you had better just look at this at all events.
.... There is a particular corner close to Cockshot windmill
yet for sale, which is most tempting. It is just the highest point,
and I don't think others could build out any part of your view,
which is a complete panorama. I am speaking as to health, for I
don't much believe in scenery — that is, short of Baiae or the
sides of Monte St. Angelo. Yet hold ! — these eyes, ignorant as
they are, alas, never see a cast of the Belvidere Torso without
revelling in that universe of hill and dale. Bracing walks too, the
mind may take among the bold acclivities of the Hercules Farnese,
hated by muffs. But I wander ; no uncommon thing now.
Pray don't think I am enamoured of a country life, or of life
at all. (O ! far, how far from it !) or that this has anything whatever
to do with my recommendation of Cockshot Hill. . . .
Think not I am enamoured of Surrey. In this county I began

240 THE LETTERS OF
my life, now seared and withered in its autumn. Keeping near the
rail, 1 have looked for a dwelling almost through the whole length
of the county, and know of no eligible spot but this. Guildford I
explored : it is in every way a failure, and land £800 per acre.
There is one other consideration I would mention, but I just
know and love the figure art so much as to speak with the utmost
deference to one of its ablest living masters. I therefore spiritually
roll myself in the sand, and rising all besmirched begin. Our his
torical painters have hitherto painted wholly from London models,
and generally in the London atmosphere. Now I have for years
been haunted by the vision of the pictures which I think they might
produce by the use of country complexions in country light.
When I say they, I mean only historical painters like yourself who,
unlike the mere rustic figure-painters, would know what to choose
and what to reject. I have often said to myself when I have seen
the glorious complexions of the " Sun-burnt sicklemen of August "1
(see The Tempest for a fine subject), and the delicious palpitations
of bloom beneath sunny and sun-burnt glow, in country girls — how
is it that, in their choice of models, the very artists who live to em
body ideal beauty, can confine themselves to London skins ? With
all my blindness, I do yet see within, something which none but
a high-class figure-painter could do ; and which done would, or
ought, in a lower view of the subject, to fetch a guinea per square
quarter of an inch. My impudence now has had its swing and is
ended, and I shrink into my own wretchedness ; and how deep that
is, can be known only by Yours affectionately, S. PALMER.
Only think of Rebecca at the well, glowing in the sunset, with
ripe, ruddy arms, and the Homeric elbows, and then of the London
Ladies bleached by the dissipations of midnight parties !

XXIX.JTo Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist.
V Furze Hill House, June 27, 1862.
Dear Mrs. Gilchrist. We are fellow sufferers. All yester
day morning I was trying to see my work through my tears. But
of those matters by and by.
Directly I got your letter I sallied forth to try and borrow a
P "You sunburnt sicklemen, of August weary," is Shakespeare's expression. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 2,1
copy of the book for a couple of days, but as my request was in
effectual, I had nothing for it but to sit down then and there and
make scribbles, intelligible only to myself, of all the designs, insert
ing however, the first and last words of each illustrated page in
hope that you have by you a duplicate copy of the text, in which
case, if you will forward it by post, I will try to find out what the
designs mean, and perhaps can then furnish some brief descrip
tion of the said designs, which, if I can describe them at all, I will
describe immediately.
My wife sends her kindest love and sympathy.
This world and its connection with the spiritual world is an in
tense mystery, so there is a strong prima facie probability that a
beneficent Creator would give us some clue. When I am tormented
with doubts I ask myself where shall I get a clue if not in the
Gospel of Jesus ; I mean the written Bible understood according
to the grammatical meaning, which is what we endeavour to get
out of any other book. Had men ever a better clue ? Could any
one devise and invent a better ? Now a clue, by the very meaning
of the word, is not a thorough explanation, nor like a mathematical
demonstration, nor is such a thing possible in the present state of our
faculties. Touching are those words of our Lord. " Thomas, be
cause thou hast seen me thou hast believed : blessed are they that
have not seen, and yet have believed!' This is our legacy — the bless
ing upon believing the unseen. And those who do so our Lord
will suffer, more effectually than Thomas, to touch his wounded
side and be healed. . . .
Admirable, I think Mr. Rossetti's verse. I have only just
begun, owing to bustle. What an admirable man Rossetti must
be ! Yours ever most truly, S. Palmer.
It is growing late, but as I know it is a serious thing to stop the
press, I send you the following very meagre catalogue from memory.
As I have not the letter-press to refer to, I must speak of the
designs independently. If this will do, it will save you the trouble
of sending me the letter-press ; indeed, Blake's letter-press, some
times, does not illustrate the designs at all.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a little book, the pages
within a fraction of six inches by four. All the pages are illumi
nated. The letters, in the copy I saw, were red for the most part.
The words of the title-page are surmounted by a strip of land,
R

to

242 THE LETTERS OF
bearing on each side scant and baleful trees, little else than stem
and spray. Drawn on a tiny scale,. lies a corpse, and one bends
over it. Flames burst forth below, and slant upward across the
page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very core, two spirits rush
together and embrace. In the second design, to the^ right of the
type, there runs up an almost leafless tree. A woman /clinging to
the thin stem, and holding by a branch, reaches its only cluster to
a rnan standing below. Distant are twq)figures^fallen I think, and
writhing on the ground.j7 At the top of the third [design], a woman
rushes forward,pursued by devouring flame Beneath,lies a slain man.}
Two murderers are rushing away. ' In the next, the sun sets over the
sea in blood. A spirit struggles and plunges. h Another, in the midst
of fire, would fain rush to her, but an iron link clenches her ankle
to the rock. The fifth [design] resembles the catastrophe of Phaeton,
save that there is but one horse. Spines of flame are already kind
ling below. Below the text of the sixth, an accusing demon with
bat-like wings points fiercely to a scroll — a great parchment scroll
across his knees. A spirit sits on each side recording. In the next
design, we have a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to
its mother's bosom. From the birth-cleft ground, a spirit has half
emerged. Below, with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful,
ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page. At the top
of the 14th page,/a spirit with streaming locks stretches his arms
across it — the arms extended, and pointing hither and thither. She
hovers, poising, over a corpse looking as if laid out — the arms
straight by the sides ; helpless ; uncoffined ; and flames rolling
onward to consume it. The ninth design is of an eagle gazing up
wards, flapping her wings. Her talons gripe a long snake trailing
and writhing. Both are flecked with gold, and coruscate as from a
light within. The tenth gives us giants, as the text would suggest,
but the Ugolino story as it would seem, were it not for two extraneous
figures. The next is a surging mass of mingled fire, water, and

"blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge double-fanged serpent,
his crest erect, his jaws wide open. In the twelfth, the disembodied
spirit, luminous and radiant, sits lightly upon its late prison-house,
gazing upwards, whither it is about to soar. It is the same figure .
as that in Blair's Grave, where you see also the natural body bent
with years, tottering into the dark doorway beneath. The
thirteenth and last design gives Blake's idea of Nebuchadnezzar in

SAMUEL PALMER.

243

the wilderness. I have very old German translations of Cicero and
Petrarch, in which, among some wild and original designs, almost
the very same figure appears. Many years had elapsed after
making his own design, before Blake saw the woodcut.
The copy I saw was highly finished. Blake had worked so
much and illuminated so richly, that even the type seemed as if
done by hand.
The ever-fluctuating colour ; the spectral pigmies rolling,
flying, leaping among the letters ; the ripe bloom of quiet corners ;
the living light and bursts of flame ; the spires and tongues of
fire, vibrating with the full prism, made the page seem to move
and quiver within its boundaries ; and you lay the book down
tenderly, as if you had been handling something which was alive.
As a picture has been said to be something between a thing and
a thought, so, in some of these type books over which Blake had
long brooded with his brooding of fire, the very paper seems to
come to life as you gaze upon it — not with a mortal, but an
indestructible life, whether for good or evil.

/XXX. To Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist.
Furze Hill House, July 2, 1862.
My dear Mrs. Gilchrist. Mrs. Palmer has looked at the
original work and finds that the doubtful word is " Genius "' —
" Thou seest a portion of genius lift up thy head." I think there
must have been a colon after " Genius," but Blake's punctuation
and spelling always wanted watching, so it does not do to trust
to hasty transcription in the copy which goes to press.
I have delayed the MS. for a day, as you wished me to look at
the text, and as I am finishing works against time, it is with the
greatest difficulty that I can snatch, or rather tear time to write ;
but such very grave suggestions arise in reading The Proverbs of
Hell that I felt it a duty to give you my opinion about the matter,
though I assure you I do not rate that opinion highly on this, or
any other point. I shall give it you simply and plainly in the
rough. Don't think me arrogant, but just simply expressing what
strikes me, like a child for the first time in Madame Tussaud's
" Chamber of Horrors." r 2

244 THE LETTERS OF
But before I begin, just let me say that I have no wish to-
claim as my own the few paragraphs describing the designs. They
are quite at your service, in any way you like. I am only very
glad that, done under such fearful disadvantage, without the
_ originals to ruminate over, you think they will do.
Now then !
Imprimis, what follows has no relation to my own opinions and
belief, but I speak of what I think will be the prudential proceed
ing relative to the public, and reviewers.
Life is uncertain, and lest I die before I have time to say it, I
will say at once that I think the whole page at the top of which I
have made a cross in red chalk would at once exclude the work
from every drawing-room table in England. Blake has said the
same kind of thing to me ; in fact almost everything contained
in the book ; and / can understand it in relation to my memory
of the whole man, in a way quite different to that roaring lion
tJie " press," or that led lion the British Public.
Blake wrote often in anger and rhetorically pjust as we might
speak if some pretender to Christianity whom we knew to be
hypocritical, were canting to us in a pharisaical way. We might
say, " If this is your Heaven, give me Hell." We might say this in
temper, but without in the least meaning that that was our
deliberate preference.
This is the clue to much of Blake's paradox, and often it
carries its own explanation with it. Where it does not, without
presumptuously recommending you what to do, I will just say
what course I should think best. I should let no passage appear
in which the word Bible, or those of the persons of the blessed
Trinity, or the Messiah were irreverently connected  I
should simply put * * * s ; and in case of omitting a page or
chapter, simply say " The  th Chapter is omitted." This
sometimes gives zest — a twinge of pleasant curiosity to the reader,
the more attentive through not having the whole. I should
state where complete copies could be consulted, I suppose the
British Museum. Thus I should be guilty of no injustice to Blake,.
nor would I ever omit without asterisks ; for it is not just to any
author, living or dead, to join clauses when he has words inter
vening. Now I have nearly done, but this one thing more occurs to me,

SAMUEL PALMER. 245
that I think it would explain matters somewhat if the public knew
that Blake sometimes wrote under irritation.^ Nothing would
explain some things in the MS. Being irritated by the
exclusively scientific talk at a friend's house, which talk had
turned on the vastness of space, he cried out, " It is false. I walked
the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with
my finger."
In his quiet moments, he made the devil on the heath say what
he (Blake) hated, and the angel among the hay-cocks, what he
(Blake) loved.
His real views would now be considered extravagant on the
opposite side to that apparently taken in the Marriage, for he
quite held forth one day to me, on the Roman Catholic Church
being the only one which taught the forgiveness of sins ; and he
repeatedly expressed his belief that there was more civil liberty
under the Papal government, than any other sovereignty ; nor did
I ever hear him express any admiration for the American
republic. Everything connected with Gothic art and churches, and their
builders, was a passion with him. St. Teresa was his delight.

If madness and absurdity be synonyms, which they are not,
then Blake would be as "mad as a March hare," for his love for art
was so great that he would see nothing but art in anything he
loved; and so,~as hejloved the Apostles and their divine Head
\lbr"so I believe he did)^ he must needs say that they were all
artTstsT^YraT^eeaTouch of this absurdity in his Marriage, where
'he-Tnakes- the blessed Comforter the spirit of poetic invention.
So indeed he is— that is, of the highest poetry like Milton's ;
but Oh he is something more! Else we should all be doomed
to learn The Proverbs of Hell by heart in their own " printing-
house." In the copy I saw, "printing-house" are the only
black letters. They are very black. It has a droll and good /
effect. If you have that edition, without designs, of the Songs [of
Innocence] published by Wilkinson, it would not be well to paste
the type into your copy without looking it over, as I think there is
a mistake in the grammar here and there, and if not more correct N

1

246 THE LETTERS OF

than Blake's own, there is an obfuscation as to the priority of the
II e and i in such words as "believe," "receive" &c. There is an
\ ugly mistake in that line, " Where flocks have took delight,"
"^ il instead of "ta'en," but perhaps that is Blake's own.
I am sorry to write in such an off-hand, impudent way. It is
almost as bad as Blake's naive mention of Isaiah and Ezekiel
dining with him ! But it is near midnight, and I have had a hard
day's work, and there was no choice but to write off-hand or not
at all.
*--i£-1 f~At any other time but a time of such bustle, I should have felt
much at seeing your dear husband's hand-writing once morej] indeed
if I once indulge myself in serious thought I shall sink down.
Tears, tears, tears are your portion and mine. It is perhaps well
for us that we are so much engaged. He whom you have lost is
never out of my thoughts twelve hours together. In one of your
letters you speak of the principle of reaction, I think. I could not
but believe as I read it that you would find its blessing on the
largest scale — reunion in eternity after bereavement in this short,
vain life of ours.
Pray give my kindest regards to Mr. Haines, and love to the
dear children. I hope Percy will buckle to his Latin grammar
because he feels it disagreeable and dry, for he must remember that
everything he has learned was so at first, and that the value of
everything on earth is pretty much in proportion to the difficulty
of acquiring it.
" Taking pains," means taking pains— putting oneself to pain in
the first act of application, which habit afterwards becomes, in
some sense, one of the greatest pleasures. I have always found
among my acquaintance, that the more eminent are so just in
proportion to their being the more painstaking. What can appear
more fluently exuberant than Burke's prose ; yet, after he thought
he had quite finished his manuscript, he went on correcting, and
sometimes seven successive proof-sheets of a passage witnessed his
unwearied pains. Emerson says Genius is Patience. I should be
inclined to say, Genius is Accuracy. Talent thinks, Genius sees ;
and what organ so accurate as sight. Blake held this strongly.
His word was " precision." Believe me, dear Mrs. Gilchrist, Yours
ever truly, S. PALMER.

SA M UE L P. I L ME-R. 247
XXXI. To Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist.
Furze IIili. House, September, 1862.
My dear Mrs. Gilchrist. ... I am delighted with the
sixty pages, and do not know when I have found so much in
teresting matter within so small a compass. Your dear husband's
charming and eloquent criticism rouses me, weak as I am.
I am glad to see that you have taken such skilful pains with
the punctuation, and that the printer has rendered it so carefully,
because it tends to the sine quit non of al! writing — Perspicuity ;
especially in this age, when people read fast as a luxury, and
expect to catch the meaning in a moment.
Bfarke used sometimes to correct to the amount of six or seven
proof-sheets, after he thought he had finished, and I have no doubt
punctuation was part of the business. Moliere was not far out
when he made his housemaid the measure of public perception.
I fancy we arrive at the expression of our thoughts something
in this way. First by perspicuous vigour, so that, as to quantity,
the alterations should be very inconsiderable. In the fair copy we
mend the manner and mar the sense ; in the third, we unite both.
Sometimes afterwards, coming with a fresh eye, we even make the
first thought more lucid ; but woe to us if we throw away the
first rough draft, which is after all, perhaps, better on the whole
than all the intermediate attempts, though inferior to the " last
consummate flower." That Shakespeare " never blotted a line," is
only one nauseous particle of the mountain of nonsense with
which his memory is overlaid.
If this beautiful work have fair play and a large impression,
so as to get among all sorts of minds, the name of the dear
biographer will never be forgotten. I do hope and believe that
you are building him a perpetual monument, and it is this belief,
that makes me hazard my impertinences about the quality and
consistence of every trowel-full of mortar used in raising it.
This is joyful news — Mr. Rossetti's memoir. If Mr. R. were
not so great a master of verse as he is, you would have had his
translations back long ere this, but they will very soon be sent.
What I should like is this— a beautiful, medallion-like, delicate
portrait of your dear husband, immediately under the last lines of
Mr. Rossetti's memoir.

248 THE LETTERS OF
No bright thoughts have come to me since my boy left us, but
animated by reading the MS., something did strike me which may
be worthy of consideration — a preface (however short) by Mr.
Carlyle. I never saw a perfect embodiment of Mr. C.'s ideal of a
man in earnest, but in the person of Blake. And if he were to
write only thus much, " This was a good man and true," thousands
would be talking of Blake who otherwise would not care two
pence for fifty Blakes put together.
You have, of course, this anecdote about the Songs of Innocence
and Experience. Wordsworth said to a friend, " I called the other
day while you were out, and stole a book out of your library-
Blake's Songs of Innocence!' He read, and read, and took them
home to read, and read again. . . . Believe me, dear Mrs. Gilchrist,
Yours ever most truly, S. Palmer.
I can't help you about the French, and am glad I can't. W.
B. was mad about languages. Let me congratulate you on the
admirable rendering of the mother's agony in the wood-cut ; also
on the beautiful type, and the symmetrical distance between words
and lines respectively.
I fancy that, next to the training of one's own children (/ had
children once !), the most delightful of all employments is the last
correcting of last proof-sheets such as these.

:xii.

XXXII. To Miss Laura Richmond.
' ' [Red Hill].
My dear Laura. In case you should "cut" me when you
marry, I "make hay" with my letter writing, "while the sun
shines." If any friends of yours want a large and beautiful house and
garden close to a railway station, for three months, here they are.
Lady Mostyn wants to let hers for that time. . . .
I have been in London for five days, and hoped to get to see
you, but every moment was occupied, and it was impossible.
I was going to say " I think Fuseli's smaller picture (CEdipus)
in the International, one of the finest works there," but I correct
myself. We have laid aside diffidence nowadays, and drop the
" I think." We used to say " Black is black, I think." Now we

SAMUEL PALMER. 240
say "BLACK IS WHITE." We don't think it; wc know it;
and you will observe an equal advance in confidence of manner
and originality of thought. I will therefore make a few assertions
a la mode.
1. If the essentials of Art may be comprised in two words,
those words are ANATOMY AND SENTIMENT.
2. We must know the construction of whatever we would imitate.
3. Claude was the greatest landscape-painter who ever lived ;
and there is a grand picture of his from Sir Culling Eardley's at
the British Institution, which enraptured dear Mother Radcliffe :
see her journal. The drawing of the trees is sublime. In a
smaller picture (Mr. Wynne Ellis's) is a bay, exquisitely painted.
There is a long Cuyp, very fine.
4. Mrs. Radcliffe far exceeds Sir Walter Scott in descriptions
of scenery. 5. Stories from the classics are peculiarly fit to be painted at
the present time. Their connection with an exploded mythology
has not in the least impaired their beauty and freshness ; for their
freshness, being the freshness of first-rate poetry, is eternal ; and
to every man gifted with imagination, they come home at once —
fascinate and bind him as with flowery wreaths wet with the
morning dew. If you tell such a man that they are obsolete, he
will smile at you with a peculiar smile ; for, by the very constitu
tion of his mind, he and the)- are contemporaneous, and you might
as well tell him that beef is obsolete while he is in the act of
eating his dinner.
Fancy any one talking this " stuff" to Nicholas Poussin !
6. Classical subjects are peculiarly fit to be painted just now,
as a protest against the degraded materialism which is destroying art.
7. Hogs live in the Present ; Poets in the Past ; or with the
grace of alliteration — The Past for Poets ; The Present for Pigs.
The Present is not.1
8. Richardson is one of our best novelists.
[ 1 The reader may care to pursue the subject in a postscript to a letter written by my
father to Mr. F. G. Stephens, in September, 1875. Ed :—
"... landscape of any kind is poor work without its persons, polities, and human
associations, expressed or understood.
" In Yorkshire scenes, you get your landscape from the past ; and though it is, just now
the fashion to say that great geniuses have been distinguished by their sympathy with the
then present, I think their works have always synchronized with the past ; though as men

250 THE LETTERS OF
9. Sir Thomas Lawrence found Fuseli in tears, while contem
plating the Farnese Hercules.
A test of Taste. Do I love Virgil, the Antique, Michelangelo,
Milton, Nicholas Poussin and Claude ? Or, more compactly thus,
Do I love the Giulio Romano in the National Gallery ?
It is easy to make assertions, you see. As a general rule, those
who are best qualified make fewest. It is, however, a fact that
Lady Mostyn's house is to be had ; at least it was so a few hours
ago, when Lady Mostyn told my wife so. . . .
As I live in the deepest dejection of spirits, a letter would
refresh me, but I like a long one full of matter. If much engaged,
do not write at all. Believe me, dear Laura, Yours affectionately, * # # #
The highest art is what you see in the Belvidere Torso — another
assertion — I am getting on, you see !
But what is art, even the highest, compared with the " Cup of
cold water given to a disciple in the name of a disciple " ?
Let those who drink water give water. Let those who drink
claret give claret.
Let not those who drink claret give water, lest they should
want a little to cool their tongue. This is truth— another assertion.
Howard drank water and gave claret. He gave himself to those
who were " sick and in prison." Read Burke's eulogy. Be often
reading Burke. Read the finest treatise extant on political
economy, Mr. Ruskin's Unto This Last. I wish I had time to learn
it by heart. You will find Mr. Ruskin's papers in The Cornhill
Magazine 
[The assertions in the above letter are scratched across with pencil, and the, foUowing
words written. "I am not answerable for what is scratched out." The letter is not
signed. — Ed.]
and moral agents, it is to be hoped they sympathized with the people about them, and did
what good was in their power. A preference for the present as a matter of taste is a
pretty sure sign of mediocrity.
" This modern definition of genius would exactly suit dogs and cats, who are eminently
remarkable for sympathy with the present — the very present piece of cat's-meat on the
skewer ; that is their preference. But Johnson teaches us that whatever makes the past,
the distant, or the future predominate over the present advances us in the ranks of
thinking beings. And the best poets and painters appeal to this faculty and instinct
within us ; and I do not think that it is either the truth of his colour, or the charm of
his trees (unrivalled though they be), or the gold of his sunshine that makes CLAUDE
the greatest of landscape-painters ; but that Golden Age into which poetic minds are
thrown back, on first sight of one of his genuine Uncleaned pictures. "]

SAMUEL PALMER. 251

IS63
XXXIII. To Mrs. Alexander Gilchrist.
l'UK/.K Hu.l. IIoiisk, Januai y, 1863.
MY DEAR MRS. GILCHRIST. I ventured, on the strength of having
your proof-sheets in my hand, to take a little walk by myself and
our dear Author annihilated space, and gave a short but perfect
intermission of sorrow. How vividly has he recalled old times !
Such is my impression again on going through the description
very carefully this evening. The Author and his subject were con
genial !
Alas ! Why was I obliged on page 298 to erase " now and" ?
Do let him stand on your pages " that good man Mr. Finch," with
" good " in italics, for alas ! where shall his friends find his fellow ?
He died just a few months back — my earliest friend !
In him we lost the last representative of the Old School of
water-colour landscape-painting. They are all gone now.
This is remarkable, that if, among Blake's deceased friends, we
were suddenly asked to point to one without passion or prejudice,
with the calmest judgment, with the most equable balance of fac
ulties, and those of a very refined order, Finch would probably be
the man ; and yet he, of all the circle perhaps, was most inclined
to believe in Blake's spiritual intercourse. I do not state this as
giving myself an)- opinion on the subject, but simply as a curious
fact. As a man's friends illustrate his own character, and as the dead
may freely be spoken of, it occurred to me this evening that per
haps you might like, in a note or otherwise, to insert a short
notice of this very old friend of Blake ; for indeed among Blake's
friends, he was one of the MOST Rp:MARKABLE— remarkable
for such moral symmetry and beauty, such active kindliness and
benevolence as do honour to any profession, and may serve to show
the employers of artists that sometimes they themselves might be
benefited by the example of such men's lives.
If you like, I could furnish you with a very short testimonial to
the virtues of a man whom Blake was honoured in knowing 
Ever faithfully yours, S. PALMER.

-52

THE LETTERS OF

XXXIV. To Mr. C. W. Cope.
Botany Bay-windows, February, 1863.

My dear COPE. I have just read for the hundredth time,
and at a sitting, Paradise Regained, perhaps the most perfect poem
in the English language. This reminds me that Paradise Lost will
be the portion of the ungrateful. Pray, therefore, let me thank
you for your kind painstaking about those outlines, and for the
invigorating aroma of your letter frc^m the Academy. It was
enough of itself to make anyone a pretty firm draughtsman,
except such a blighted, palsied, parboiled creature as myself. 0 !
that I had had the human bones broken about my stupid head
thirty years ago ; for I have come to the conclusion that the
whole of Art may be comprised in two words ; ANATOMY-
SENTIMENT. I mean of course anatomy in the larger sense
of Structure, which will include even colour. I should long to
take home and anatomize every dead dog in the ditches, were I
not myself a dog more dead than they — a creature that cannot
rear its whelps, and may howl for them in vain ! Jeremy Taylor
says we may make a noise when we are hurt like this ; and Isaiah
— " We roar all like bears, and mourn sore like doves." 
How is an artist to be a Christian if, as Michelangelo said,
" Art is jealous and demands the whole man " ?
What an interesting little book might be made under the title
of CURIOUS QUESTIONS. In the course of my life, now
terminating so auspiciously, I have concocted twenty or thirty
which I should like to contribute under the title of UNSETTLERS,
for I rather think that experience and habits of patient thought
will lead us to believe in Christianity as the one only truth, and to
be sceptical about everything else whatever. I think Pascal came
very nearly to this. He was a Christian. He did not keep the
cross laid up in lavender, and take it out at prayer-time, and on
Sundays to " glory in it," but he " took it up" and carried it upon
his shoulders.Many thanks for your kind mention of the Gaspar Poussins,
but I think I have several of them — enough for reference. He was
not a Giulio Romano or a Bonasoni, but he was a dear old fellow
nevertheless. I am given to understand that art in London is progressing with

SA MUE L PA L ME R. 25}
such ample strides that ver)- soon all the old pictures will In
going for a old song. If you should be bidding at the National
Gallery sale, please bid up to ten pounds for me, for that Nursing
of fupiter ; very bad I dare say, but it will please a simpleton like
me none the less, and dearly should I like to hang it up and have
it to look at over my tea. It was painted, they say, about five
years ago! . . . . O that Vatican Gallery ! I stuck fast on a stair
case there, before a Greek female bust, and could neither go up nor
down. I suppose I got down, or I should not be here living in
this delightful retirement !
We are giving our best consideration to the matter mentioned
by Mrs. Cope. Wc hoped to find a really good school (which
would be far the best thing for Herbert, and for Harry too, if he
were with us), but we can hear of no such thing. There is a
small foundation grammar-school — -a clergyman the master ; but
I am given to understand that the blacksmith's son goes there, and
the sons of other useful people, and as we are very " genteel " here,
our foul English pride snorts at it.
Whatever may be our national virtues, humility is not one of
them. A lady at a party asked me in one word to name our
great national virtue. I said, without a moment's hesitation,
" Cleanliness." Yes ! we may look down from the organ-gallery at
St. Paul's, Knightsbridge in the London season, and say, " Every
one of you has taken a tub this morning ! " In what other country
could that be said ? Believe me, Ever yours most truly,.
S. Palmer. XKXV. To Mr. J. C. Hook.
\ Furze Hill House, May, 1863.
My dear Hook. " Canst thou not minister to a mind
diseased ? " Yes you can, and you have done so in your most kind
and cordial letter.
You cannot " pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow " ; but
sorrow is soothed when a man is asked to spend some time with
the very host and the very friends he would have chosen had he
been dreaming out for himself an ideal visit. These are greater
attractions than even the Devonshire junket !
And then, to talk about those islands — those wild Atlantic
rocks, lashed for ever by long-backed breakers ! To enjoy their

254 THE LETTERS OF
memory tenfold the more by contrast, riding between the Surrey
sand-banks, lapped and folded in by pastoral crofts and over
hanging orchards.
Why, from childhood onwards, are we ever dreaming of capes
and caves, and islets and headlands, and the marriage of the land
and sea ? Yet what attracts us like Acrasia's bower, and
Armida's gardens, and that Isle of isles where Calypso sang, and
Ulysses built his ship ?
But there are things yet higher than poetry and art. The
painter does nobly when he plucks new thoughts with the dew
upon them, and bids them live upon his canvas ; but he does
even better, when he takes thought for a suffering brother, broken
by an irreparable loss ; and so kindly attracts him to his
hospitality, that nothing but being quite below the mark would
hinder the poor worm from making a westward crawl.
Still I live in hope of a happy day at " Pine Wood," and of an
ideal cruise with you among the " Isles." Believe me, Ever most
truly yours, S. PALMER.
Tuesday Morning. At this moment the [Etching] Club are at
full tear upon the rail, and you are looking for your pilot-coat to
go down through the weather and bid them welcome at the station.
1864
XXXVI. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Furze Hill House, June, 1864.
My Dear Sir. . . . You read my thoughts ! — It is really very
curious. Here is the evidence. 1st. The last touch was put to
The Chapel by the Bridge the moment before I opened your letter :
2ndly. All the time I was writing my last, Mr. Chance's name was
on the tip of my pen, as the very man for the work ; but I thought
it hardly fair to introduce a rival to whomsoever you might usually
employ. By the bye, my wife is Mr. Chance's cousin, she being
Mr. Linnell's daughter, and Mr. C. his nephew : 3rdly, and most
curious of all, you ask me to show you anything I may be upon
¦" which specially affects my inner sympathies." Now only three
days have passed since I did begin the meditation of a subject
which, for twenty years, has affected my sympathies with sevenfold
inwardness ; though now, for the first time, I seem to feel in some
sort the power ot realizing it.

SAMUEL PALMER. 255
It is from one of the finest passages in what Edmund Burke
thought the finest poem in the English language :—
" Or, if the air will not pcnnil,
Some still removed place will fit.
Where dying embers ' through the room
Teach light to counterfeit a gloom,
Far from all resort of mirth,
Save the cricket on the hearth."
The lower lines a companion subject out of doors.
" Or the bellman's drousy charm
To bless the doors from nightly harm."
I am trying the former small — the size of your Chapel. The
student, in his country, old-fashioned room, meditating between the
lights : the room dimly bronzed by the dying embers {zvarranted
without "RA YS " /) and a very cool, deep glimpse of landscape, and
fragment of clouded moon seen through the lattice, just silvering
the head and shoulders : the young wife in shade, spinning perhaps,
on one side of the fireplace. Should I displease myself with it, the
" dying embers '' may revive within my own fire-grate ; if the
contrary, it will give me much pleasure to show it you by and bye.
I carried the Minor Poems in my pocket for twenty years, and
once went into the country expressly for retirement, while attempt
ing a set of designs for L' Allegro and // Penseroso, not one of
which I have painted ( ! ! ! ), though I have often made and sold
other subjects from Milton. But I have often dreamed the day
dream of a small-sized set of subjects (not however monotonous in
their shape yet still a set ; perhaps a dozen or so), half from the
one and half from the other poem. For I never artistically know
" such a sacred and homefelt delight " as when endeavouring in all
humility, to realize after a sort the imagery of Milton.
Your strong feeling for the poetic in art will make Blake's Life
a treat. It is abundantly illustrated too, and is a book to possess.
I had the honour of knowing that great man, and can vouch for"
many of the anecdotes ; disavowing, however, all adherence to some
of the doctrines put forth in the poems, which seem to me to savour
of Manicheism.
P My father quotes from memory, and although he knew // Penseroso by heart, not
only writes "dying" for " glowing," but (as the context shows) evidently thinks the
•word enhances the poetic sentiment. Ed.]

256 THE LETTERS OF
Mr. Butts's visit to " Adam and Eve " had grown in th
memory, I think. I do not believe it : it is unlike Blake. This an
the above are all I carp at.
N i Mrs. Palmer and I spent an evening with Mr. and Mrs. Gr
chrlst, looking over a number of Blake's drawings ; and were s
riveted and unaware of time, that a first look at the watch toll
three in the morning ! Our servants were frightened ! As we an
early people, they thought we must have been slain and dispose*
of in a ditchr^
LhoprfTo do myself the pleasure of calling when I venture t<
London, and am very pleased to think that your three subjects stil
interest you, and prove a resource in the intervals of your severe
studies. What should I do without resources, writhing, as I hav<
been now for three years, in agony for the death of my son, full o
promise, and just going to Oxford ? Believe me, dear Sir, Youn
very truly, S. PALMER.
/XXXVJl. To MR. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, August, 1864.
My dear Sir  For my word's sake, I send the
clumsy little blot of The Shepherd, which I trust, for my sake, you
wiil burn. I forgot a serious rule I had imposed upon my
proceedings, viz., seclusion or the fire for everything, large or
small, that was not done as well as I could do it at the time ; and
this yields the " peaceable fruit " of knowing that no one has
anything of mine which is not taken pains with, be it good or
bad : no scraps. The scribblings I can best paint from are, in the
opinion of the artist, to all other intents and purposes hideous,
therefore you cannot wonder that he invokes oblivion. . . .
You do me the honour to ask my opinion of Blake's Blair's
Grave. It seems to me to contain some of his finest designs, and
worth possessing were it only for that lovely thought, the
beautiful soul leaving the body ; with a look out upon hill slope
and sky — nothing, yet everything. Howard the R.A. said he
would give one of his fingers to design figures like Blake ; and to
me some of his background landscapes, and particularly those
Pastorals, often suggest the chopper. I think you would not

SAMUEL PALMER. 257
regret the purchase ; it is a mine of thought. There is great
inequality in Blake's drawings — genius in all. But I know none
like him, ancient and modern, when he lifts you off your feet and
out of yourself in a moment. He seems then quite up to the
mark (may I dare to sa)- it?) of Milton's Death; or that
moonlight of moonlights with the Lapland witches. {Par. Lost,
Book 2. Line 662.) ....
I am never in a "lull" about Milton in the abstract, nor can
tell how many times I have read his poems, his prose, his
biographers. He never tires. He seems to me to be one of the
few who have come to full maturity of manhood ; not however
to infallibility, which is superhuman .... Yours most trul)-,
S Palmer.

a,l

XXXYIII. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, September, 1864.
My dear Sir. I am truly glad to hear that you have
escaped the perils of that dear, naughty county, where the rule of
the year is said to be nine months' rain and three months' bad
weather; and escaped it to meet dear friends in improved health.
Mrs. Finch has told me what kind attention you have
bestowed upon her little book, and communicated your remarks,
in all or most of which I quite concur, after reading them three
times most attentively. You attacked the advertisement in front,
and I in flank, so I trust we shall see no more of it.
The real subject-matter of the book is Mr. F.'s musings ; but
somehow, each of the very few friends who have seen it seem to
feel the Memoir to be so, and they feel justly the want of more art
anecdote. It was I who suggested the title. Perhaps Musings of
a Student would have been better, as much of the book does not
relate to art ; and perhaps Some Memorials should be substituted
for Memoir. Still, I am glad that some memorial has been written, both
because it must in some degree have beguiled deep sorrow, and
because, whether the readers be few or many, the moral influence
surely will do them good.
I have nothing whatever to do with the theological part.
Swedenborg was a mystery, as I now begin to think most things
are, Kant, who knew him well, although he ignored the

258

THE LETTERS OF

supernatural (I mean the miraculous), yet confessed that there
were things of that kind connected with Swedenborg which he
could not refute.
His inward knowledge of that fire thirteen miles off at
Stockholm was curious.
Just now I have been wholly engaged with other matter, and
shall be for some time longer. But I have the Miltons, here
within, safely photographed just over my eyes, and packed in
their bone box ready for use before very long I hope. Believe me
My dear Sir, Yours very truly, S. Palmer.
Two similar tables might be made showing respectively the
opposites and varieties of colour and of effect.
P.S. As you wished it, I have sent you the rough lines. But
I could not at all express what I mean without spending a day
upon each ; but with the aid of the voice and my new little
Milton portfolio, I think all could be explained. The following
will perhaps help to show how I propose to distribute the serious
points among the subjects.

U Allegro.
No. 1. Sunrise. Fine Morning. Agri
cultural. Farm sentiment. Hunting. The
Pastoral.

// Penseroso.
Grey morning. Grey moors. Shower.
Wind. Yet not wretched, or sloppy. If
you like this, I should be glad of any in
ventive suggestions. I think wind and
wet are a variety worth securing. Tran
sient rain.

No. 2. The upland sentiment. Freedom.
Merriment ; including the best points of
the ' ' Many a youth and many a maid. "
Song and fruitfulness, like 65th Psalm.

The inland sentiment. Deeply recessed.
Cavern ; waters falling. The one piece of
glory pours down through the leaves,
making the "arched walks" doubly
solemn. The obscurity of the hinted
figures, hinting that it is or may be a
haunted forest.

No. 3. "Straight 'mine eye." Wide
expanse, melting into fairyland, &c. Sort
of dancing grace in the leading lines.

Wide expanse of blank water. Instead
of bleatings of nibbling flocks, the solemn
curfew, and the lowing steer.

No. 4. The amber sky. Meant for the
quintessence of the remote and romantic
in the severe sense of the word. Day
rather dreaming than dying.

Mysterious suggestion. More meant
than meets the eye. The sleeping fold a
sort of comfort, so that there should not be
desolation. Darkness.
"Thy hand, great anarch, lets the curtain
fall."

SAMUEL r A I. MER. 259
Would you kindly read the text and just name to me what
good landscape subject seems to you left, after the eight I have
named are taken away : e.g. there is the '• many a youth," to
begin with. Then we may be said to have ransacked the whole.
I think there are several, but I have stuck to the literal view
from the first. The " dying embers " I think one of the very best,
but don't see how it could possibly be treated just now.

XXXIX. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
V^_ Red Hill, September, 1864.
My DEAR Sir  I hope I can give a good answer to
your L' Allegro and // Penseroso inquiry. They have occupied
much time and thought ; and viewed in the whole, the parts, the
relations : then laid aside for work that was pressing, but not
until the first survey was complete and I felt that I could do the
whole. Yesterday, some of the designs came to me unawares, and an
impulse to begin the " Straight mine eye " and " Lonely tower."
How different is the inward sight of a thing to speculations
about it ! For years, off and on, has the former subject teazed
me, owing to something in the text. I had been over it again,
and at last given up the quest — when suddenly, as I could not go
to the thought, the thought very kindly came to Mahomet, and
unlike anything I had expected.
Milton's nuts are worth the trouble of cracking, for each has a
kernel in it. Monkeys and illustrators are apt to make faces,
when they crack and find nothing.
That mystery which cannot be commanded, that immaterial
and therefore real image, that seed of all true beauty in picture or
poem falls into earthly soil and becomes subject in a great measure
to the conditions of matter, and fails or fares as the soil permits —
the desert sand ; the ploughed fallow ; the rich, garden mould. To
say that the seed does everything is fanaticism. Milton saw both ;
the former which in his prose works he expressly asserts to be
divine ; yet what a soil was he preparing who knew Homer
almost by heart at sixteen !
I doubt whether the best images can be made use of by an
s 2

260 THE LETTERS OF
imagination which is not coupled with large reasoning power ;
and we know what, in ripe years, was Johnson's verdict — that
excepting Butler, there was more "thinking" in Milton than in
any of our poets. He said, " I admire him more than I did at
twenty." Yours of the marble settings is indeed a refined and comely
thought. It set before me a series of works " severe in " " beauty " ;,
but such works as with their several marbles were to be fitted
again into compartments of national or sacred buildings, rather
than the veiled recluseness of pastoral or Georgic ; and should not
what borders the work be quite even in tint ? If we had gone to
that remarkable man — that great patron of British genius, if men
had their dues — to Mr. Butts I mean, I think we should have come
away best pleased if we could remember nothing about the frames..
To do this, however, there must be good workmanship, for we may
say of frames as of good men that they are at their best when they
nullify themselves.
Blake often expressed a wish to take me himself to Mr. Butts',
but ere a day was fixed, " came the blind Fury." What a show,
with such a showman ! What a casket of a house ! What prince
of his own choosing ever got together under his broad roofs so
many precious thoughts ? Yes, so many, even if they had been
bolted to the bran, and a third part burnt as refuse ?
You say " my thoughts were confined to the realistic aspect of
the poet's thoughts. Would that it were given me to rise higher,
but each must be content," &c. " It is something to be able to feel
a degree of elevation, when examining such outpourings as those
picture thoughts of Blake." Something indeed ! Something, it
seems to me, with which you may rest not merely content, but
thankful. We are all of us more or less influenced by the fashions of the
day, and the arts of the day are influenced, like its literature, by
materialism : but you are aware of the influence, and anyone who
loves Milton as you do, and does not hate Blake cannot be much
tainted. Truth in art seems to me to stand at a fixed centre, midway
between its two antagonists Fact and Phantasm.
You have too much taste to like the fantastic, so that must
not be set down against you, but on the credit side of the account.

SAMUEL PALMER. 26i
Perhaps your very realism is imagination or something very like it
— something which will develope into it, as you become better
acquainted with the inner circles of art. Mr. Carpenter is the
chancellor of our university ; our Bodleian is that quiet print-
room at the Museum. Below, in the Townley Gallery, is the sure
test of our imaginative faculty — the sleeping Mercury. More
than two thousand years ago the sculptor bade that marble live.
It lived, but slept, and it is living still. Bend over it. Look at
those delicate eyelids ; that mouth a little open. He is dreaming
Dream on, marble shepherd ; few will disturb your slumber.
We will go our ways, and feed upon our "facts''; our " bits of
nature " ; our bits of fish ; our fresh herrings or a deal board with
all the grain in it. " As nat'rul as life isn't it, master 'Gustus,"
says the nursery-maid — " And the herring, why it looks as if we
could scrape the scales off with a knife ! "
"So move we, each his own desire to find,
A substance, or a shadow, or the wind."
Believe me, dear Sir, Yours very truly, S. Palmer.

XL. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, October 20, 1864.
My dear Sir. Here I sit, with those two ivy-leaves and with
your comment before me — so sad, so poetical, so true ; yet I must
needs rejoice to think that you have returned unscathed from dear,
spongy Devon, to dry, dirty London. Devon quite haunts me
now : I have been working all day at an attempt to get its
quintessence. The Etching dream came over me in this way. I am making
my working sketches a quarter of the size of the drawings, and was
surprised and not displeased to notice the variety — the difference of
each from all the rest. I saw within, a set of highly-finished etchings
the size of Turner's Liber Studiorum ; and as finished as my
moonlight with the cypresses ; a set making a book — a compact
block of work which I would fain hope might live when I am with
the fallen leaves.
I was the more led to this, as I find that each subject will
incorporate something or other of picked matter in my studies

262 THE LETTERS OF
from nature, and be far removed from the pseudo-classical, which I
hate 
Heartily do I subscribe to all you say against the figment of a
new revelation or dispensation. Have we exhausted this ? The
Foundation can be but One ; is then the superstructure meagre ?
The Spirit poured out at the Day of Pentecost a stinted legacy?
Is it not that by our own lack of faith we have forfeited many of
its privileges ?
People have a notion, gorgeous and glowing like those leaves
you " lifted off, " of a moral millennium just beginning to rise softly
like a summer dawn. A curious time for it, when almost all the
periodical press is influentially , though but a smaller part of it
avowedly, infidel, and the powers of good and evil are even now
mustering for the battle.
The influences of the day promise much worse things than
paganism with its perverted truths and misapplied devotion.
What measure of light was permitted, Pagans would not have
changed away for the wretched debris of rotting skulls and flint
arrow-heads. If so-called science bids us give up our faith, surely
we have a right to ask for something better in exchange !
I have some humble doubts whether the spiritual and physical
can ever be made to appear consistent in the present state of our
faculties, because they seem to exist under different conditions —
the physical in time and space, the spiritual in some other media.
It is happily true that though, as Lord Bacon says, science tends
to atheism until carried very far, yet that, as in the case of Galen's
study of the human hand, its erratic orbit wheels round again.
Busy as you must find yourself in resuming harness, do not
trouble yourself to write ; and as I am in like case, pardon silence
on my part, Believing me &c, S. PALMER.

irfl.

X#I. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, November, 1864.
My DEAR Sir. Many thanks from Mrs. Palmer and myself
for your so kind and cordial invitation : from myself for the kind
interest you take in my brain-work ; which must needs be pleasant,
and I should think beneficial, to artists and authors, if it leave
them, as it ought to find them, as free from vanity as new-born babes.

SAMUEL PALMER. 2(,T,
A certain preacher once said from the pulpit, " Talk of the
innocence of babes ? Why a new-born babe is one of the greatest
hypocrites that ever set foot on British ground ! " But I must
differ from the Reverend Gentleman.
We shall not alas, be able to avail [ourselves] of your kindness,
as I dare scarcely leave the room except for indoor exercise ,
although better, and in vigour of thought and work such as it is. What
it is I never can tell when about it, or directly it is done, but can
only conjecture from the sort of moral influence which is upon me
at the time. If I'm in a " fine fellow " state of mind, then I suppose,
it will be trash, but generally it turns out tolerable if I have the
grace to suffer and to love. For the intellectual is a curious counter
part of the spiritual. Love stoops to suffering ; takes it up, carrying
it in her arms, "And makes e'en suffering s\\ eet "
as St. Teresa sings — winding up each stanza so.
It is very kind of you to take an interest in the matted woods
called Going home at Curfew-time. I can't say I suffered much
over it, from my intense love of Devonshire, but it lay by a good
while, and whenever I could get at it, I did so.
No artist has seen it except one of my brothers-in-law, and he
likes it better than anything I have done ; but what will the public
say ? What they said to George Primrose's Paradoxes ? x
The thought of exhibiting sketches makes me feel sea-sick.
Yet what have I done ? Mr. Field spent an evening here and
somehow made me promise to send a blot which he fell in love
with, so that's gone to the Water Colour.'2
In your North Devon cornfield, there is a bit of white left as a
good place for a rabbit, in case of making a picture from it. Now,
if I were to put in a good rabbit, it would unfinish the corn ; and
work upon the corn would ruin the distance, which is the point of
the case. For sketches and pictures arc wholly different things. . .
Directly you were gone, 1 terrier'd into the Milton Warren, and
in a moment pounced upon the prey — sought for years, that shy
animal the " curfew."
Handel has set that very finely ; and in the end, the lights in
the villages seem to go out one by one, through the use of what I
I1 Vicar of Wakefield, Chapter XX.— Ed.]
[2 Near Clovelly — A page from the Blot-book.]

264 THE LETTERS OF
may call the double minor where, in the third, the semitone changes
its place thus. . .
But I must not remain in the warren just now, having a press
of things to do. . . . You shall see (D.V.) every Milton as soon
as it takes intelligible shape ; meanwhile forgive this most incoherent
scrawl from, my dear Sir, Yours ever most truly, S. PALMER.

V
XLII. To Miss Louisa Twining.
i Furze Hill House, November 22, 1864.
Dear Miss Twining. If anything reminding me of the past
could be very pleasing, after the blow which struck me down, it
would be the sight of your handwriting again.
How differently we have spent the intervening time ! You, in
" taking " as dear Burke says, " the gauge and dimensions of
misery, depression and contempt" — I, in making marks upon
paper to amuse the public.
If you can think of, or rather if you can set your heart upon
copying anything of mine, let me know, and I will contrive some
means of sending it. I don't wish it to be made a matter of busi
ness ; and please let the lending it be between ourselves. I don't
mind sending two or three, as I know your conscientious carefulness
and habits of order ; but, having carefully considered what you
have done hitherto, I strongly advise you not.
You should now go on, as you would have done with me, to
make use of the degree of imitation you had mastered ; to study
the manner in which the best masters applied it to nature ; and how
they simplified [nature's] intricacy and, when necessary, did the most
in the least time ; which is particularly desirable in your case, whose
time is so occupied with still better things.
If you could paint a robin red-breast perched on a twig, and
finish it so highly as that we could tell what o'clock it was by the
reflection of the dial of the village church in its eye, you would
have done a work less noble and natural than Gaspar Poussin in
that small picture in the National Gallery, with the sheep coming
forward in the shady lane. Such works lead you to detect large
arrangements of light and shade in nature, and so to take hold of
nature in its practicable moments.

SAMUEL PALMER.

2"5

Don't think I am undervaluing detail and real finish ; it is the
preparation for everything that is noble. Claude, of whom Fuseli
says that his characteristic is sublimit)-, one would wish to be
studying day and night ; but I am now trying to devise what is
best under the circumstances to bring your hand in, to make you
free of your colour-box, and read)- for your tour work ; and though I
mention these first, as relating to the matter in hand, they are but
the smaller advantages.
I am too poorly to write perspicuously, yet I really want to ex
plain myself. However, it will be " confusion worse confounded," so
I will take the popular method of dogmatism. Suppose yourself
standing before that divinest of landscapes, Claude's Enchanted
Castle. Lo ! It becomes real (in the silly popular sense of the
word), and you walk up and enter the gates. You find it full of
the most beautiful paintings, and long to make some memoranda of
them. You have only a fortnight to stay in the neighbourhood,
and have permission to go to work. Now, with a like spirit of
vigour, go to work in the enchanted schools of our National Gallery
on fine days (for it is ill lighted at the best), and on dull days, to
sweet, quiet Dulwich College.
Take hot-pressed thickest imperial [paper], and on about Jth
imperial, according to proportion of picture, make little, rich, bold
copies of a few of the broadest works. A very thin wash of white all
over the paper will make the colour "take" at once. Take pains
with the outline, and in all the nearer parts : put bistre into a swan
pinion, .... and outline firmly. Have two saucers and two
pens — saucers for distances with a mass of Cologne earth on one
side, and a mass of cobalt on the other ; at the bottom, make the
tint you want, to feed the pen with by the brush ; this gives you a
great scale of inks, from cobalt, which is colder than you are likely
to want, on to Cologne earth. Then, in the other saucer, have bistre.
I have tried this in sketching from nature, even in remote
distances, and find it save much time. It is not indelible : so much
the better. Keep on refreshing your ink outline as you go on.
You can have pens for various colours. You will of course have
pens ready, cut to various degrees of fineness, for the varying
distances. Use the zinc-white (in tube) freely, whenever it is of
use ; only mind (and this is very important) when you use
heightening lights, on a tree already painted for instance, do the

266 THE LETTERS OF
lights first, delicately and sharply with white ; when dry, add the
colour. Above all, use plenty of colour. I mean that the smallest
touch should be put from a tempting bit of paint just worked up
with the palette-knife, and laid crisp and comfortable ; no scrub
bing and fumbling from colour dried hard, and spoiling a poor
brush in the effort. Until a vituperative dictionary is published,
I can't tell where to find any epithet vile enough to hit this kind of
work. Plenty of paint, and interstices of palettes cleaned every
day, and kept replenished from the tubes before you go out. Large
brushes for large work. The darkest touch in the original to be
laid at once, as dark as it is to be at last, which will be helped
by the pen outline. Try at the National Gallery the pictures I
mention, washing all but the sky with Cologne earth, as a ground
to work on. The rather long-proportioned Gaspar, I forget what
it is called (this large Gaspar will do you vast good) ; Sir Joshua
Reynolds's property and favourite, Sebastian Bourdon's Return of
the Ark,\i hung within sight. At Dulwich, a very fine Cuyp;
very few cows, one black, or spotted with black ; church tower I
think on the opposite bank : you will know it by the amber sky.
Yellow ochre bright enough I should think ; perhaps a/ little
gamboge in it.
You may say, " But these are not the kind of things. I want
to sketch from nature in Italy." I am quite aware of that.
On a small piece of paper half the size of ^th imperial,
washing it all with Cologne earth before you begin (excepting
highest part of light in sky), you might make yourself a little
treasure to hang up, from that facob's Dream of Rembrandt.
You are the only lady I know, to whom I should recommend
dashing, but I advise you to dash at these ; to turn your swan
pen into an anchor, and then be bold and get these little copies,
through thick and thin ; sometimes painting with your brush, then
with your fingers. With his finger, they say, Titian put the last
finish ; it is a wonderful instrument in painting. Don't forget a
bit of sponge, only keep it away from the highest lights ; don't
alter, but go right ahead, and do the next better. The first outline
should be with softish pencil, lightly used in the distances, and
having got your paper as nearly as you can to the proportion of
the original, hold a thread diagonally across so that it intersects

* r

SAMUEL PALMER. 21,7
the corners of the work, and see where the centre touch comes, and
afterwards what objects coincide with the lines ; and having the
corresponding lines delicately marked on your paper, you will find
much time saved.
Get as much as you can the desired amount of force as soon as
possible, and keep refreshing the outline. Weak outline is at once
killed by the colour, but you will find work for the tubes with a
firm line underneath. You will soon find that you will want more
tubes for Italy than you would otherwise have taken.
Dark pictures are best drawn on brown crayon-paper (the tint
of whity-brown, but a little darker) only you cannot scrub the
colour about so well. Any time you can get for pen and ink
copying of Claude's trees out of Liber I'eritatis (at the British
Museum print room) the better. Trees are so important. In the
small picture of our Saviour appearing, which belonged to Mr.
Rogers there is a perfect school of copse and ground painting:
you might get a study of that, in black and white chalk.
Believe me, my dear Miss Twining, Yours most truly,
S. Palmer.
1865
XL/11. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, Saturday, February, 1865.
My dear Mr. Valpy. . . I shall be most happy to do
what you mention as to the National Gallery. But alas, in many
cases we should have to admire the past majesty in the present
ruin. All the pictures unprotected by glass have succumbed to
London dirt, and many to the London cleanings, far the worst of
the two. Years ago, Sir A. Callcott told me he remembered the
magnificent Bacchus and Ariadne far different to what it was even
then. When you add to this, that the old rooms are vilely lighted,
so that you cannot see what is in the pictures by any straining of
the eyes, we shall find in a new sense of the words that seeing
must be believing. The collection of Claudes was wonderful ; 1
have seen their gradual decay, and then the fearful cleaning wliich
swept the dew, the light, the pearl, the golden influences into the
pail and committed them to the sewers. The St. Ursula alone
escaped, and happily abides, merely in its dirtiness  Believe
me, dear Mr. Valpy, Yours most truly, S. PALMER.

268 THE LETTERS OF
XLIV. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, February, 1865.
My dear Mr. Valpy  None seem to need a little
spiritual help more than earnest artists. I have often thought that
feeble ones are likely to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven before
them : for there is a close and curious analogy between the really
intellectual and the spiritual life — so close, that art is apt to become
our religion. The very '' experiences " are analogous — almost
identical in sequence, though not in kind. There is, as Reynolds
says not irreverently, the " becoming as a little child," the New Birth
in fact, when the real artist abhors himself and esteems his best
efforts as "filthy rags;" when, either by sudden conversion, or a
protracted struggle like that of Bunyan's in his Grace Abounding,
the painter in the loves of his mind (whether or not in the power of
his hand), escapes " like a bird out of the snare of the fowler," from
the NATURALISTIC— not from the natural, but towards the
natural : escapes from " Hagar," his " Mount Sinai in Arabia,"
" which gendereth to bondage," towards his " Jerusalem," the
IDEAL.
Like Tereus, he tries awhile the half-fledged wing — fluttering
above his own old roof, " the house of bondage " ; and then, in all
his desires, and sympathies; and loves, wings his way to those
distant ridges where "the morning" is "spread upon the
mountains." Unworthy as I am even to take his name upon my lips, I will
venture to write two lines of one of Michelangelo's sonnets,
"Above the visible world she [the Soul] soars to seek
Ideal form, the universal mould."
Then come " experiences " ; inward darkness, doubts, all but
despair ; seasons of refreshing. In short the thing is so thoroughly
an intellectual religion, in its whole, in its parts, in its inward pro
cesses, that it is but too likely to supersede the renovation of the
Heart, while it is in the highest degree refining and elevating the
intellect. And what is most curious, there have been I think in
every age the unconverted and converted, the Naturalistic and the
Ideal working side by side ; and with the farther most sad resem
blance, that the unamiable converted have much to learn and much
that they would do well to imitate in the amiable unconverted ; if
really amiable, loving people can be said to be unconverted. I will

SAMUEL PALMER. 26a
not venture to say it ; nor to forget that in the Heavenly Father's
House are " many mansions," and that man)- shall come from the
east and from the west and sit down in the kingdom.
That solemn tone and stately line which we see in the great
Masters was no happy necessity of their time. I was looking at a
picture at Hampton Court which had none of those qualities, but
was a most dexterous example of the naturalistic and academic,
when the friend who was with me said, " That was painted in the
times of Titian ! " . . . . There was a somewhat similar contem
poraneity in Domenichino's time of a set of fast workers upon dark
grounds and conscientious painters upon white grounds (just like
Bunyan's Passion and Patience), and fine squabbles they had, if I
remember rightly.
How delightful it is when the converted style of art is
employed upon sacred subjects, as in that most touching St.
Jerome, the Perugino Tobit, and the Mantegna — the Filippo Lippi
too ; those holy doctors and confessors sitting together in a sort of
garden. What a wonderful subject would it be (were there any
one who could handle it), the conversion of St. Augustine — the
final victory under that tree in his garden ! " When thou wast
under the fig-tree, I saw thee." It has the disadvantage of no
action : perhaps Fra Angelico might have hit the expression.
According to the theologians, it would seem that there are
varieties of degree among the holy angels, as to intellect and
heart ; the Seraph, wholly absorbed in the direct ecstasy of love ;
the Cherub, loving through his intuition of the Divine Wisdom
and Goodness.
The Tuscan Archangel (to pursue the parallel) knew well that
art, even HIS art, was not in itself religion. In one of his
sonnets he bewails, if I remember rightly, how art itself had led his
thoughts and meditations from the cross. After a life of contra
diction and persecution (the parallel again — " He that was born of
the flesh persecuted him who was born of the Spirit " ), it is
delightful to know that his soul was illumined by the full glory of
the gospel ; the princess Colonna, herself converted through the
doctrines of Savonarola, having in their high and august con
verse "taught him the wa)- of the Lord more perfectly." His
last words to those who stood around were these, " In your
passage through life, remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ."

270

THE LETTERS OF

Every one knows that Bartolomeo too was one of the fruits of
his friend Savonarola's ministry.
But who am I, to gabble about blessed Savonarola ? Pardon
me, sacred memory !
What made me run on so I can't conceive ; poor " Mr.
Talkative " never got over the River. Dark, dark River !
Thank you again for your couple of oars, and believe me, dear
Mr. Valpy, Most truly yours, S. PALMER.

XLV. To Messrs. Walter and John Richmond.
Red Hill, April, 1865.
MY DEAR YOUNG FRIENDS. I have no seal (otherwise it
should be at your service), but I have an impression, not on wax1
but on memory, that I lent Mr. Giles my seal that he might have
another made from it. The only seal I remember was made of
steel, or iron, or some metal which looked like them.
My impression is perhaps erroneous. Should all vestiges be
lost, I must go to Heralds' College and request them, with what
sweetmeats they may like to add in the way of unicorns and
griffins, to give me my pet crest, A bull dog, patient. I
esteem the bull-dog, because whatever he lays hold on he does not
willingly let go again.
Being much vexed at my printer's one day, because an etching
did not "prove" as I had expected, I adjourned to an eating
house hard by, that, invigorated by some beef and draught stout,
I might endeavour to form my character anew. The ideal I finally
fixed upon, was that of A CHRISTIAN BULL-DOG.
This, in much weakness, I have since been endeavouring to
realize, but alas, with many lapses and frailties.
The human race may be divided into mumblers and holdfasts
in the proportion of mumblers, 1000 ; holdfasts, 1.
" The spider taketh hold with her hands, and is in Kings'
palaces." Of the wise woman in The Proverbs we are told that "her
hands hold the distaff."
I1 My father had and I still have a wax impression of his family seal. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER.

11 1

I have thought much of you, my dear John, during your long
illness. If, by the Divine blessing, you can but regain your
strength, you will perhaps have been no loser ; for there is
something about affliction which gives us sympathy for the
sufferings of others — it acts like a vigorous stone-breaker upon
the flint of our hard hearts. For my own part, I dread coming
near any one who has never been in trouble ; he might tear me in
pieces for his amusement ; as the old feudal lords (who look so
pretty in poetry), coming home after a bad day's sport, would
shoot down a few stray serfs to make amends. When, after a hard
day's hunting, they came home very tired, it is said that they
found warm human blood refreshing to steep their feet in, and
tapped a vassal or two for the purpose. One of those gentry got
into a scrape with the just St. Louis for hangi?ig a very little boy
for snaring a rabbit I A boy at Eton refused to let the late Lord
King, who was then his "fag," use a toasting fork in making toast
for him ; for the thought that a human hand was scorching and
withering made the toast taste all the crisper. Lord King's hand
was maimed for life.
Now these propensities seem to be modified by affliction, and it
is worth while to suffer a good deal of pain if we become less
unjust and unkind. Then we shall turn away disgusted from these
barbaric tyrannies, to that homage of LAW which distinguished
the best times of Greek and Roman history. Depend upon it,
dear Walter and John, that if the diapason of the

moral universe do not, as we grow up, become fjfr~ a — liberty
, . , , ,, t¥—&  Obedience
sweeter to us than music over the waters, we shall ^ e~ L!™
have no music in our souls, though we " do our scales " till we can
warble enharmonics like a cat upon a skylight.
" Shut up ! " says the contracting note paper. " I was manufac
tured to waft sighs and vent flatteries, and I can't a-bear this stuff
about history, and liberty, and them sort of fellows. I was reared
in a slave state, supplanted linen, was formed in a mould, and
crushed into polish ; and as to Romans, and what d' ye-call-'ems,
I'd have you to know that I am meat for their masters." 0 ! I'm
so frightened — yet ever, Yours affectionately, S. Palmer.

272 THE LETTERS OF
XlVi. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, June 3, 1865.
My dear Mr. Valpy. ... I am happy to say the " drip
ping eaves " have long been provided for in the subject we
agreed upon for the passing shower. * I have no longer a diffi
culty about the brook ; what I had, arose from attempting to
combine it with the avenues of pine and monumental oak, which
is distinctly another theme. Yet it is surprising how many indi
cations, how much bye play (or by play) may suggest itself, if
strict unity of main subject be secured. Thus, the cottage
behind the aged oaks may find a place in the " Prospect " or
elsewhere : and I fancy my temperament, or whatever we call it,
would lead me rather to overfill with matter than otherwise.
Of course, if possible, I shall be glad to indicate that it is
ancient timber which surrounds the brook dell ; but the avenue
subject, like aisles of a cathedral, cannot be combined with the
brook, without sacrificing one or the other.
It seems evident to me that poetry, being successional as to
time and to suggestion of space, and as it can turn and look all
round it, admits more objects than picture ; but that picture,
although tied to the unity of one moment and one aspect, gives
incomparably more illustration to each of the images.
But I perfectly agree with you as to what should be aimed
at, " to use the minor, to lead up to and strengthen the major
element of thought," nor do I think that it could be better
expressed. It is in the tertiary regions and masses that these attractive
minors suggest themselves, which do not come within the scope
of first sketches, the latter being something like skeleton school
maps. I wish I could have the pleasure of seeing Lord Ellesmere's
collection with you. Besides the Three Ages of Titian there is a
real Leonardo da Vinci, and a Palma Vecchio with the lakes (!),
after three centuries, as fresh as when they were painted. Hallam
thinks Leonardo altogether (not merely as a painter) the greatest
man of the Middle Ages. Believe me, &c, S. PALMER.
[ ! The Morning Milton —Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 27;
XLVII. To Mr. Richard Redgrave.
Kuk/k Iln.i. Huu.su, July 14, 1865.
My DEAR Redgrave. I ought to correct a mistake of Mrs.
Palmer's about the board I work upon. It is six sheet " London-
board " of best quality from Newman's, Soho Square (which I
think a most reliable place for water-colours), imperial or royal :
the royal, they say, is made for or used by flower-painters.
I take off the gloss by rapidly sponging with water (a little
alum dissolved in it might perhaps do no harm) — rapidly lest the
paste should soften underneath ; thoroughly, so far as to see that
it takes the water everywhere. I was driven to use it simply
because, on the best modern paper (the onl)- sort to be had since
Creswick's was bought up), I found it impossible to get any one
quality I liked.
At first I felt like a baby on a slide, but found that this might
be avoided by using the colours less wet than on simple paper.
Ultramarine especially, and the ashes, always difficult to [lay on in a]
wash, will not bear a full, wet brush ; but a very thin wash of zinc
white over the sky and distance part, before beginning, might
facilitate. Several practised artists have done this.
These difficulties have their equivalent advantage in the ease with
which a bit of sponge or even a wet brush will remove dried colour.
In this respect the surface is intermediate between paper and ivory.
I have done my largest things upon it ; getting it made on purpose
rather than use paper. I fasten it round the edge with the smallest
flat-headed brass pins (not passing them through it, which, if you
avoid working much on parts already wet, prevents warping), upon a
thin, light drawing-board of seasoned pine ; the screws which fasten
on the cross bars, having room for contraction of wood. ... A
sheet of white paper is fastened on the front of the drawing-board,
so that even if you have not much margin of the " London-board,"
you have a sort of white mount.
Some of the advantages are these. 1. If safe colours are used,
they will not be liable to change, as on the newer papers. An artist
told me that, in the course of a quarter of a century, drawings of his
on paper were now and then sent to him to refresh or restore, if
faded in parts, but never once on Bristol board, now called " London- T

274 THE LETTERS OF
board." 2. It reflects light through the pigments.1 3. It shows the
full depth of the colours laid on, and as you retouch with more
colour the retouchings are still darker, as one would suppose they
naturally must be. In the modern papers, you come to a full stop
at a point far short of the depth of the pigment— in fact it is an
ocular paradox. Believe me. Ever yours most truly, S. Palmer.
(XLVIIL'To Mr. L. R. Valpy.Red Hill, December, 1865.
My dear Mr. Valpy. The pictures of The Lonely Tower and
Haunted Stream have been in hand some time, and lately I have
been at them heart and soul, wishing to get one or both ready for
our summer exhibition.
I hasten to remove any anxiety on your part by mentioning, as
I thought I had done before, that none of the subjects would be
proceeded with about which we had not conferred, without showing
you the designs. . . .
You, perhaps, have little of my own fastidiousness. After we
had agreed about The Stream and Tower, the sketches underwent
a rigorous examination by me before I transferred them to the
picture papers.
Danger is likely to accrue rather from my own over-fastidious
ness than otherwise ; and in art, that is sometimes more dangerous
than rashness. If once, in the doing, caution and fear get ever so
little ahead of impulse and joy, a work is, I think, in its worst peril ;
though all four are good, each'in its time and turn throughout life.
I am the very " youth " ! ! of the biography upon whom Blake
turned with the question, " Do you work with fear and trem
bling ? " and I could tell him now, as I told him then, " Indeed I
do." " But I look cheerfully on the Milton set because my mind is
in undivided allegiance to them and in their very arduousness I
find my delight. . . .
As to the order of doing the respective subjects, I apprehend
that each will be done best, whensoever its impression on the artist
is most vivid. I should not have troubled you with all this if I
could have borne to think that you were under any unpleasant
anxiety. . . . Yours very truly, S. PALMER.
[ 1 A point my father esteemed most important. See his references to white grounds
in oil-painting, and to transmitted light in nature. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 275
1866
^XL/x. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Rl'.li llll.l,, Fein nary, 18OO.
My DEAR Mr. Vali-v. It is indeed gratifying to hear that
friends who travelled so far and in such weather were not dis
appointed. Mrs. Palmer thought that the leaden light of that day
quite spoilt the studies.
I will remember your wish, but studies made with a motive
are of such useful reference that until parted with one does not
quite feel their value. One such, containing the rocky matter of a
mountain, the soil here and there, and a full clothing of heather &c,
I miss to this day. I was prevailed upon to part with it along
with that former set of waterfalls which I have sometimes referred
to, and which I should like to re-purchase whole and entire had I
any clue to it.
I went " beyond my last " in venturing conjecture as to the
future of those pitiable ones who sin, not against a known gospel,
but by the very force and virtue of filial obedience, parental com
mand, earliest habit, unanimous consent and example of all around
them : by all else scouted and hunted, and from the cradle to the
grave — the thief's cradle to the pauper's grave, exposed to every
variety of temptation, except indeed that of wealth, in itself per
haps of all the most dangerous. Blessed be God that even
through that ravine of the "needle's eye," many have passed,
though as it were, one at a time, to His great glory. Let us sing
Te Deum for that glorious man who has given so munificently
.... to afford the London workmen healthy habitations.
Vile were this hand if it wrote anything adverse to the " Faith
once delivered." But its symbols, which have graven essential
verities in adamant — such preeminently as the Lord's coming in the
flesh, " Born of the Virgin Mary," and as we say again in the
Nicene, " And was made man" — these creeds have left large
spaces for private meditation and pious hope.
If I mistake not, Jeremy Taylor in his Liberty of Prophesying
inclines to a large scope, making the creed we name from the
Apostles a competent measure of saving belief. Of this, who am ,
I that I should venture to speak ?
In my ignorance, for it is no perverseness, I can sing in Church

276 THE LETTERS OF
those awful clauses of the Athanasian Creed and yet have little
fear for such, for instance, as Mrs. Barbauld — her name happens
first to occur to me. And now I remember to have heard of her
husband, a German, who was ever dwelling as he taught in broken
English, upon the love, love, love, of the dear Heavenly Father.
The crystalline logic of that symbol seems to me to imply possi
bility of belief in those to whom the faith is proposed — moral
possibility, and to denounce only the unbelief which springs from
moral perverseness. It is in the moral perverseness that Taylor
places the very essence of heresy. But "Taylor is broad" you may say.
Every day reveals to me more and more my own ignorance,
and, "the Faith" alone excepted, makes me more doubtful of
everything. Yet of one very serious matter I feel as fully per
suaded as that the pen is in my hand : namely, that there are, from
time to time, great mental and moral epidemics for good or for
evil ; and that these are not reasonably to be accounted for, but by
referring them in great part to spiritual agency : that there is now
an epidemic of unbelief as real as the cattle disease, and somewhat
resembling it in the dates of its recurrence : that we are all perhaps,
even the most simple*believers, in danger, nay I was going to say
perhaps slightly influenced by it.
Myself you will perhaps think more than slightly tainted, and
that an " auto da fe " would deal with me as a vigorous govern
ment with these cattle.
__J We love matter; we revel in subdivision, we glory in
space, and we say, " If space and matter be infinite, what room
is left for spirit, and for the Creator of spirits ? " There seems in
deed to be no common measure by which the two can be ap
prehended or measured upon together. But happily, we have the
witness in ourselves. Self-consciousness is an a priori impregnable
by the whole universe of matter. If a man does not believe (and in
this, I apprehend, lurks the virus of our present epidemic) that spirit
can move matter — then, it seems to me that astronomy itself will
draw him towards atheism ; but to him who believes that the him
self who moves the wondrous mechanism of the hand (the hand
which converted Galen), is spirit, and an emanation of the Father
of Spirits, to this man the Heavens will declare the glory of God
and the firmament show forth his handiwork. ... I remain, my
dear Mr. Valpy, Yours ever truly, SAMUEL PALMER.

SAMUEL PALMER. 277
P.S. This invincible repugnance in some men's minds to
believe that spirit can act upon matter seems to be the obstacle to
their belief of miracles ; but if we assent to it, then the whole of a
miracle is as much cause and effect as ordinary phenomena ; differing
in this, that the miracle includes and brings into contact two trains
of causality ; the one spiritual, the other material ; and the former,
being the more powerful, matter is forced by it out of its usual course.
Perhaps in Miss Fancourt.'s case (which gave occasion to Dr.
Maitland's essay in the Eruvin). the same process took place which
in cases of ordinary cure, is the work of months and years ; although
in her case it was what we called instantaneous : but then with the
Lord one day is as a thousand years. When once the miraculous
fiat had set it going, the process which removed malformation in
the "impotent man,"Jiad human sense been quick enough to follow
__it7|night have been such as would have satisfied Sir Benjamin Brodie.
By the bye, Sir Benjamin Brodie asserted that the evidence was
irresistible for one alleged miracle so unpopular just now that I will
not even venture to name it. Na)-, the more ethereal kinds of matter
itself acting on the grosser, force them sadly out of their usual,
phlegmatic conditions ; witness the late lightning havoc at Falmouth.
Nay, a bit of sealing-wax rubbed on the sleeve will seduce naughty
little bits of paper from their allegiance even to the " laws " of
Gravitation, that great goddess of the Ephesians.
Excuse the erasures of this little note. Mine is a stammering-
tongue which erelong will be " silent in the grave."

L. To Miss Frances Redgrave.
Furze Hill, July 6, 1866.
Dear Preceptress.1 I owe you apologies for never noticing
your kind present, the photograph of the great Energizer. O ! for
the leisure to contemplate it an hour daily with knotted scourge in
hand to lash myself into some semblance of his efficiency.
I paid a first visit to the Academy, but was fairly driven out by
the heat before I had seen half the best oil pictures, having
f1 During Miss Redgrave's visits, my father used to amuse himself and her, by
grotesque attempts at pronouncing French words and sentences. She corrected his pro
nunciation, and thus he came to call her his " Preceptress." — Ed.]

278 THE LETTERS OF
moreover been waylaid in my approach to them by a beautiful
drawing of your papa's which reminded me of the scenery about
the brow of Holmbury Hill ; I mean the distance, particularly.
Pity and forgive when you hear that Mr. Frost's x picture gave
me great pleasure. The poetic beat and movement of the feet
upon the sands among other beauties. Indeed I could not help it !
Don't scold me ! His pictures always seem to me so refined, so
quiet ; painted as if he loved the thought ; with no vulgar appeals,
or knock- me-down-all-of-a-heap-executibn. But when " costumes "
" is in," fairies " is out."
No doubt you saw those noble works of Reynolds at the British
Gallery. The very day on which I was looking at them, his
countrymen were suffering the unique Wellesley collection, for
which he would have bid so high, to be dispersed by auction !
It would seem then that we have not been idle during the century
which has elapsed since that great man was in his prime, but have
shown an " alacrity in sinking " which would have outdone the
heroes of The Dunciad.
Mr. Woodburn told the artist who denounced Sir Thomas
Lawrence's collection as " Hortus Siccus," that he had heard of
people who did not admire Homer, but had never been aware that
it was Homer's fault !
Yes ! those dear, precious Claudes that Dr. Wellesley spent a
life in collecting are with the four winds. What are we lusting
after to fling away such a banquet ?
Once more accept my thanks for Mr. Cole's much-valued image
and believe me, Yours most truly, S. PALMER.

-I. To Mr. L. R. Valpy. Red Hill, August 27, 1866.
My dear Mr. Valpy. Refreshing myself with another read of
your last kind letter, I found that I was asked to " report progress."
What a monster I must have seemed to neglect so kind a wish ! . . .
I have just got up from a very pleasant musing upon The
Haunted Stream, which I hope before very long will be in a showable
[ 1 Mr. Frost's tardy election to the full honours of the Academy was a very sore sub
ject with my father, who seemed to see in that tardiness an affront to Imaginative Art.—
Ed.]

S AMU EL PA L M E R. 270
state. I have been kept from it through wishing to get a couple of
drawings done .... and having got through the hard work, can
now hope, D.v., for a little Miltonic solace ; for, exquisite as arc
some of the favoured aspects of nature, no facts nor representation
of facts alone can give rest to the mind which has humbly dwelt
on the works of the ideal masters. Though sight is the most
refined of the senses, yet sight of colour and shade is a sensual
pleasure, unless the visible suggest the historic and poetic ; and it
is perhaps the very intensity which belongs to sensual appetite that
makes us fasten with such appetite upon sketches done at once
from nature. But He who gave us the senses wills that we should
use them in measure, with thanksgiving. Wc have sensual pleasure
in smelling a honeysuckle, but of so refined a class that it almost
suggests poetry. What can be more attractive, as to the present
pleasure we derive from it, than the journal of some quick perceiver
and bright describer, written day by day off hand while exploring
beautiful country, and among interesting races of people. While
reading it, the grand, old, stock thoughts of the poets seem almost
conventional and musty in comparison, and their personages rather
stiff and old-fashioned — Ariadne, and Procris, and Psyche, and " all
those fellows," as a ver)- unpoetic person once called them.
But yet, long after the journal has been forgotten, we catch
ourselves wandering with Gallus along the margin of Permessus,
though scarcely daring to hope for a glimpse of the sister who led
him upwards. Yours most truly, S. Palmer.

LII. To Miss Julia Richmond.
Furze Hill, September the something, 1866.
My dear Julia. I would do anything I could to please you,
but a LETTER is really quite out of my power. Letters should be
so artless, you know, so negligently elegant ; they want the natty
native-grace-Gainsborough-kind-of-a-touch : at least so the critics
say, and I really don't think we want any more of them — letters I
mean ; or either. We have Pope's, and Cowper's, and Gray's.
Cowper's name is with me the synonym of elegance, and some say
that Pope's smell of the lamp ; but I like oil, and would recommend

280 THE LETTERS OF
you to breakfast upon Betts' cocoa, with oleaginous globosities
bobbing about as you stir it, like porpoises of the deep.
And if this is " too rich " (for gross it is not), then a slice of
roast beef and a pint of home-brewed. Perhaps we grow, both in
mind and body, to be somewhat like our diet ; therefore, though
it should never be gross, it need not be nervous, vapouring
fantastical, like strong green tea : much less narcotic (by the bye,
they are now making cigarettes for the ladies), like that detestable
tobacco— the substitute for food which they cannot afford to buy,
with our half-starved field-labourers. I am told that the target
practice is in every case impossible until cigars are relinquished.
London-season-ladies go to opium at once. The labourer's pipe
smells comfortably in a country lane on a chilly, autumn evening,
as he is plodding home from the furrows ; and we have no reason
to complain of Milton's single pipe and glass of water before, going
to bed, for he rose early and soared without roaming (see the last
couplet of Wordsworth's [sonnet] to the Lark — one of his best, I
think) : but all these things have their mental analogies. There is
a kind of green-tea poetry and smoky philosophy of which we may
have too much. Shelley, if I remember, in his ode to the lark, assures
that bird that, after all, he is no lark at all, but a spirit ! a spirit I
" I say — none of that ! " the bird might have replied, as the Tower
warder to dear Mr. Finch, when he saw him sketching the armour.
Poetry may be too transcendent, and so may music, may it
not? Are paradox, muddle, and bombast the "three graces" of
literature ?
" What have ladies to do with literature ? " — Who said that ?
O you brute ! Tell me, barbarian, are there not many ladies in
England who have made Cowper a pocket companion ? And who
can read Cowper without being the better, morally and mentally ?
" He's flat." — -Is he ! What, because he doesn't bother you about
the " mystery of Being " and that kind of thing. Flat, I suppose,
as fine music is flat, after the barbaric crash of unprepared German
discords. I beg pardon, dear Julia, I was rebuking that demon who
whispered something about ladies not reading. O don't they read.
Did not they rush to hear Carlyle lecture against all sorts of
vanities, with rings on their fingers, a French novel in the
carriage, and a poodle looking out of the window ? Besides, they

S A M UEL PAL ME R. jS i
read Milton — 0 yes 1 Once — quite through, as a pious duty ; and
think the battle of the Angels " awfully sublime " — as it is.
Upon the whole, 1 think women (when not rebellious) better
creatures than men — less irreligious, less selfish, and self-indulgent;
but their views of the sublime are peculiar. I remember that John
Varley, whose lady pupils were legion {angelic, legions you will
understand), was dreadfully put out by this peculiarity. " Why,
they think Salvator Rosa more sublime than Claude ! " he used to
say, and rub his face, and look as cross as he could look, for he was
the soul of good-nature. . . .
As ladies read, let me recommend you Fairfax's Tasso even
though you may have read the original. He was born with music
on his tongue, and moreover was Queen Elizabeth's godson ! ! ! !
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There's a chance !
Perhaps he kept a gig ....
Now, dear Julia, write me as many letters as ever you like ;
they always give me pleasure. — O yes ! you'll write me such Devon
descriptions that I shall seem to be sweetly smothered in cream.
Do tell me all about that dear country : but I really can't write
anything rational ; so you see, unanswered letters of yours will be
a virtuous iteration of returning good for evil.
Many happy returns of your coming birthday, with all my
heart. Yours affectionately, S. P.

LIII. To Mr. R. Redgrave.
V  J Red Hill, October i, 1866.
My dear Redgrave. I must trouble you with one line just
of thanks for your great kindness to mine who are solaced under
your roof, as the pilgrims of old at the " House of the Inter
preter " . . . .
With this, or within a post or so, you will get one of Dr.
Maitland's mud-carts. There is a procession of them, like Mr.
Darke's. That man spent his life in carting mud out of men's
minds, and in eliciting out of utter confusion the present Lambeth
Library. His reward — dismissal, on accession of Archbishop
Sumner. The great mud-cart-man of antiquity had better
fortune, and very beautiful carpets, as we know from the peculiar
recognition with which Diogenes favoured them.

282 THE LETTERS OF
It is very kind of you to send a word of advice to such a lost
wretch as I. " Change of scene." Yes ! would I could get it — but
where ? 1 must still take myself with me, alas ! Yet I should like
one peep at the Southern sun before I look my last at him. Just a
glimpse of Naples perhaps, from the Vomera, glittering like a
mosaic of gems, but with innate living light from a sea of
beryl. — O ! this won't do ! I am going off ! This morning my
family went to that respectable and salubrious green-mud-side
resort, The Marina St Leonards. I can't make the letters slant
enough. Margate is a nice place (Turner knew it well), but people
won't go there ; for if they do, they see poorish folks enjoying
themselves, which of course is quite shocking !
With many thanks to Mrs. Redgrave and yourself, and love, if
I may say so, to the dear young ladies, believe me, ever Yours,
S. Palmer. /LIV. To A. H. Palmer.
i
Red Hill, October 14, 1866.
My dear Herbert  Your mother's account of the new
lodgings would, if I were movable, bring me down for a day, but
there is no fear of my coming. I should prefer a room built
imminent ; bumped from beneath by the booming brine ; or, to avoid
vulgar alliteration, a tambourine for Thetis, which, though alliter
ative, is not vulgar. By vulgar I mean coarse, not common ; for
some of the commonest things are the best ; light, air, bread, for
instance. All secular and much moral wisdom is taught by the epic poets.
The Georgics, thot^ghjio^an epic, teach the wisdom of all life and
the mysteries of intellectual discipline under the veil of agriculture,
vintages, cattle, bees, so that the veil itself is glorious — the dia
mond is set in gold. Take, for instance, this simile, on the danger
of a little remissness after long perseverance : —
" Non aliter, quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum
Remigiis subigit, si brachia forte remisit,
Atque ilium in prceceps prono rapit alveus amni."
How many might this have saved from ruin ! Fools call these
things folly : I have done.
When we meet (D. v.), remind me about the occasional growth
of our English rats to the bigness of a good-sized cat.

SAMUEL PALMER. 283
All facts arc worth having, and should be investigated with
patient accuracy ; though a mountain of facts will never make even
a mole-hill of truth.
We may teem with facts and yet be deplorably ignorant. But I
am going off again ! Subject to fits, you see ! While foaming, I
will finish with a bit from Hcraclitus, I think, given loosely : — "The
knowledge of many sciences will never give wisdom, but the voice
of the Sibyl, by the divine Power, shrill with unadorned Truth, is
heard after a thousand years ;" and the root of all — the first word
of wisdom is GOD. All things are innocent which do not
grieve Him. And we find that, where the conscience has been at
peace, there has been to the last, even with the martyrs, a lambent
sprightliness and humour like the harmless play of summer light
ning. But, as Addison observes, what would have been shocking
levity in another sort of man was lovely in Sir Thomas More.
He is speaking of his joke about his beard and the scaffold.
I take no credit to myself for not being full of the gossiping
stuff which makes a " nice letter." In fact the supply has been
cut off, as no one has been here.
I dearly love solitude, but miss poor " Tabby." If I could but
have taught her to read, what a comfort she would have been
to me. You may be, please God, a balm and cordial to my heart
— but I fear the odds are against it. Men of my turn do not
please the neighbours about them, and disrespect is catching- : and
not being a bold, pushing, blustering, black-whiskered " fellow," in
a blue coat and yellow buttons, elbowing everybody I meet, you
can't look big upon the strength of it, and say, '' As to my father, he
is a REAL WINE-MERCHANT." You know the story.
Carry with you through the week these words of Balaam.
" He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the
Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk
humbly with thy God ? " (from the Sunday's lesson, Micah the 6th).
Remember in your prayers, dear Herbert, Your loving father,
Samuel Palmer. To A. H. Palmer.
Red IIii.l, Sunday Evening, November 4, 1866.
My dear Herbert  It is high time you got to the end
of the syntax, and then the daily readings through the month will

284 THE LETTERS OF
be sure, I hope, to keep it in memory. . . . The total difference a
liberal education makes in a boy's habits of thought, style of
speech, and general demeanour makes me most anxious that you
should secure the principal points at all events, and a thorough ac
quaintance with the Latin grammar makes other things easy. I
think, with our Vicar, that girls should learn it too ; for a know
ledge of Latin gives a mastery over English which nothing else will
give. . . .
Jane and I get on together like a pair of silver doves : —
" — not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene."
She is most attentive to make me comfortable ; and I hope
that never by any unintentional rudeness, [do] I omit to show the
high respect I feel for her.
When my room was being done and all my things were out in the
"HaU" (for one must be genteel writing to Brighton),^ who
should pop in but Mr. Collard. It amused me much, I was driven
from " dibbing" work for that day, and all the " fal-lals " were off
the drawing-room table, replaced by a mighty mass of Virgils !
Then, indeed, I felt that things looked " respectable " in the true
sense of the word, and not in the sense of " keeping a gig."
This is a gossiping letter, is it not ? What different things go
by the same name ! Think of St. Paul's letters, to which the
dying Grotius said he would devote ten years, if they could be
spared to him ; and to descend to a lower sphere, what an elegant
correspondence was that which Charles Fox carried on with
Gilbert Wakefield when Mr. Wakefield was in Dorchester gaol, as
to whether the nightingale's note expressed joy or grief. Then,
how the classics were ransacked !
Jane thinks I had better leave off now and have my dinner
and I am like a lamb in leading strings.- " Wise as serpents and
harmless as doves," the Apostle says. If we once lose sight of
GOODNESS as the PRINCIPAL THING we are adrift without
an anchor. If we merely ask ourselves what will people say of us,
we are rotten at the core.
I have done as I was bid — eaten my dinner, and in public too,
P The words in italics are written in a most genteel and flourished hand. — Ed.]
- Not intended as praise to myself, but to the strings, for a man may be too much of a
lamb after all.

SAMUEL PALMER. 2S5
like the Kings of France. Miss Thomas called. . . . and is only
just gone. I told her I was not up to the politeness of the French
Court in the reign of Louis XIV. When the king would show
a particular mark of favour, he took a morsel of something, a
sweetmeat perhaps, and having bitten off a piece for himself, sent
the rest down the table to the favourite guest. Soldiers then were
the only "gentlemen," and when besieging a refractory town their
favourite pastime was to catch some of the town-folks' babies.
impale and roast them, if I remember rightly. So much for the
fashionables of the most fashionable reign of the most fashionable
age. I am not clear whether they did not sometimes eat the
roasted babies.
These and a thousand other piquant mischiefs vary the
administration of Satan's kingdom, and to a corrupt heart make
it more entertaining, however shocking sometimes, than religion —
religion as observed from a false point of view by the children of
this world, as a negative propriety, or a grim demeanour; but not to
those who esteem conquest of self as real a siege and struggle as
the taking of a city — nay, not to those who are sufficiently read in
ecclesiastical history to see all the elements of heroic poesy, nay
even of spiritual romance and chivalry in the story of the Church ;
whether grappling with sin in the courts of princes, or hewing a
way with missionary hands and axes through dense forests among
the wild beasts ; draining marshes, confronting and converting
ferocious barbarians ; and eventually, round each retreat in which
they had planted the symbol of suffering, causing the desert to
" rejoice and blossom as the rose." .... The way to praise our
Lord acceptably here is to learn to pray. " Lord, teach us to pray,"
said the disciples : and our Lord then gave them that divine form
of prayer which goes by His blessed name, but was wholly or in
part used before, I believe, in the Jewish liturgy.
Now I want you ever to remember, that saying — repeating any
form of prayer, is in itself no prayer at all, if the heart do not go
with the words: and believe that Satan and his agents are evcr
busy to thrust in distracting thoughts. A boy who has endeavoured
to " place himself in the presence of God," and in the fewest words
really asked forgiveness of faults, thrown to Heaven one loving
glance of thankfulness, and asked God to help all His creatures,
and His whole Church, and then goes merrily abroad, in his young

286 THE LETTERS OF
friskiness turning somersaults half down the street, is more likely
to have the protection and blessing of God through the day, than
another boy who has been to matins, very demurely kneeling, but
never once sending up a real prayer, his mind being occupied with
other things. This is no fault of the holy liturgies which we have
received from the Apostles and Fathers (our divine Communion
Service is supposed to be very nearly that used by St. James,
Bishop of Jerusalem), any more than it is a dinner's fault if we eat
without chewing it. But the Church which contains and teaches
ALL TRUTH, and is thereby distinguished from other bodies
which teach parts of truth, has never discouraged private extempore
prayer, and I wish people, especially young people, practised it
more. The words will be in a literary point of view poor stuff
probably, compared with the inimitable forms we are used to (the
exquisite second collect for Evening Prayer, and the prayer of St.
Chrysostom for instance), but what has literature to do with pri
vate prayer ? The loving, filial eye is the thing — the tear in that
eye ; the pang for having offended ; these are what the Father loves ;
and all art and literature are as inferior to these great and eternal
transactions of the heart, as education, literature — what in short
the Scotch call the humanities are, in turn, incomparably superior
to the objects of worldly ambition. With love to all, believe me
dear Herbert, Your loving father, S. PALMER.
Don't forget to pray for me daily.

LVI. To A. H. Palmer.
Red Hill, November, 1866.
My dear Herbert. I am not going to write you a letter, but
just to mention one or two things as refreshers to memory. When
I found that you were likely to stay so long, I told you to learn
daily one of the little portions of the new syntax, besides reading
over the daily portion of the old, and I hope you have not failed to
do so. This will leave at least 23 hours out of the 24 for sleep,
eating, and holiday making.
Would it not be a sad thing to lose what you have been at so
much trouble to learn and I to teach ? This very light exercise of
memory will just be what a mininum of daily exercise is to the

SA M UE L PA I MER. 2S7
body. If, for several weeks, you were obliged to lie perfectly still
through the whole twenty-four hours, I doubt whether you would
be able to move a muscle when you tried. It is an ignoble thing to
receive of God the light of His sun, and the fresh, sweet air, and to
be quite useless in the world — to live, as the Apostle says, "to
ourselves," instead of " to him who died for us."
Young people must be trying to learn some one thing at least ; to
learn some one thing thoroughly. You are upon Latin grammar,
which wise men consider the best first step to efficiency in after life.
Now I wish you to spare me the trouble of reminding you, by
being your own Mentor.
Howard, and Inglis Richmond have just taken tea with me. and I
enjoyed their visit. Of the two I prefer the society of boys who
are in earnest about their learning, to that of grown people, who
often lose their young ardour for progress, and become stationary
or retrograde. Inglis thinks my plan of the daily grammar reading
excellent, and says that Mr. Giles did much the same with him, but
with three points of difference : first, after the daily repetition with
out book (the second point), which lasted an hour and a quarter,
Mr. Giles used to present him with a couple of the finest possible
oranges, and with half a dozen, on the wind up of Saturday's ex
ercise. Thirdly, they divided the grammar into six instead of three
portions, so that the whole grammar (one about the size of Valpy's)
was repeated without book from beginning to end, every week.
Now I have done my duty (which, please God, I will do till I
am put away), and it remains for you to do yours. Usually I fear,
the less is asked the more difficult it is to get it done.
Having no time to compose letters, I merely talk with my pen,
and it was in this way that I called the drawing-room -table books
" fal-lals." I merely spoke of their outsides — all that gilding and
stuff, and their solemn parallelism with the sides of the table,
which Jane sedulously cultivates, not forgetting the central nosegay,
•a red rose in which, she observed, was the very first thing which
attracted the Miss Wilkinsons when they called the other day. . . .
I have a letter in several sheets from Mrs. Finch addressed
jointly to your Mamma and myself, from which I extract a little
bit to show you the unexpected and important uses of acquired
knowledge, when there is a virtuous disposition to use them for
good, as in the case of my quondam pupil.

288 THE LETTERS OF
" I am going to-morrow to spend a day or two with Mary
Humphry, wife of Professor Humphry of Cambridge, their home
being one of the rendezvous of the savants of the place. She also
remembers you with interest and kindness. Such a pair, I ween,
are seldom seen, as she and her husband. When he was about to
bring out a work on the human bones, she set herself to learn to
engrave, and illustrated the volume with plates, not from copies,
but from the bones themselves — dry work, some people would
say ; and now all his lectures are enriched with her illustrations,
magnified by herself to gigantic proportion. Are you not proud
of your sometime pupil ? "
I hope not, for pride will have a fall. But I want you to
notice what follows. I always remarked in that family a thorough
ness in the education. Nothing was loose or slippery, and there
was no show or parade. The little I did for her would have been
quite thrown away upon most people, but thoroughness was in that
house. Observe too that any important branch of study is found dry
only by dry minds. If I am getting too serious again, I may
vary pleasantly by observing that for some days the water has
declined to go down the sink, and that I am going to get Mr.
Nightingale to look at it. This is what people call a substantial
fact — no moonshine or nonsense about it. Also I have not missed
my monotonous walk every morning. There's another fact for the
benefit of the whole human race. Now comes another with a
more pleasing sentiment about it. Miss Thomas has brought
Jane a very pretty coloured glass smelling-bottle, with which she is
much pleased.
Now to stuff the mind with a legion of little facts makes it
stupid and heavy as a bed is made heavy by its fulness of light
feathers ; and the very facts are useless, because we have no main
study to which they minister. Then, if we take up Sunday's
epistle, tliat will seem hollow to us — fanatical even, though we may
not dare to indulge the thought. It speaks of a hope laid up in
Heaven for such of the Colossians as the Apostle addressed. Now,
if we become carnally-minded we shall say, " For my part, I prefer
a bird in the hand." . . .
This is a dull boy's letter ; nothing of cricket, boating only
incidentally ; but this house is a centre of dulness — a becalmed

SAMUEL PALMER. 289
pond with neither ducks nor drakes to splasli about in it. With
love to all, and commending you to the Divine blessing, I remain,
dear Herbert, Your loving father, S. Palmer.
DONT FORGET JANE'S SKA-WEED.

LVIL To Mr. L. R. Vai.i-y.
Furze Hill, September 13, 1867.
My dear Mr. Valpy. I wrote one line to acknowledge the
safe arrival of Religio Medici . . . and chiefly to apologize for
my rudeness in never so much as thanking you for sending The
Times . . .
Those church-breakers exploded me. Next morning. . .
lapsing into a sweet tranquillity, I took out The Haunted Stream
for the first time. I think you will like it, as I am touching it with
pleasure to myself, in a much-musing mood which is not always
one's experience. . . . You cannot tell how much I like the plan
of written annotation : it leaves one at peace to do a little now and
then as one feels it, without fear of forgetting.
Allow me strongly to recommend (his theological bearings
excepted) Mr. Matthew Arnold's Oxford lecture on Culture and
its Enemies (printed in The Cornhill of July) as a work of real
thought and perception. I hope his " Philistinism " will become a
household word, and tend in some measure to civilize our dear
country. He is trying to teach us that man is to be estimated
not by what he has, but by what he is ; and that " sweetness and
light " are even sweeter than sovereigns ; but with a change of
dynasty in France, and its not impossible alliance with America
against us ; in the present state of our defences — our navy, and our
artillery, we should perhaps not survive to take the lesson. Believe
me, with best regards, Yours very truly, S. Palmer.

LWH. To Mr. L R. Valpy.
- September, 1867.
My DEAR Mr. VALPY. Many thanks for your sunset, which
is particularly interesting to me as I have sketches of various
phases of the near greys, separated or rent, and have used them for
u

290 THE LETTERS OF
several subjects. When rent sufficiently, I have seen all the
palette, or rather choir of greys which lie between blue, or violet,
and copper colour (in one case all the splendour of rose and purple,
orange and gold), far away in the horizon, with the dark nimbus
near and detached.
I was a little disappointed with the Wye, as far as four miles up
beyond Tintern, but most likely it improves as it becomes more of
a mountain stream.
I was anxious to mention what I read the other day, that
Herefordshire contains many unspoiled, ancient granges and
manor-houses, which are to me the gems of England, the landscape
around being a setting for them. When you are well up the Wye
you might perhaps find a little belting tour of Herefordshire well
worth a day or two's experiment. You might find some relics of
the most ancient machinery and implements for cider making, and
a few of the grand large cottages (for grand they are), some five or
six hundred years old, buttressed with stone and ribbed with heart
of oak. These reminders of the " dark ages " ( ! ! ) vanish right
and left before the railroads, and give place to the new lights of
lath-and-plaster, stucco, and whitewash. The sentiment of real
English remoteness is therefore the most precious, and with all its
sacredness of human, and sometimes divine association, seems to
me more truly grand and entertaining to the imagination than a
good many " Loch Lomonds." With an intelligent countryman as
guide, and the ordnance map, I should like to explore that part of
Hereford for old farms and buildings of all sorts. . . . How nice
it would be to get photographs of some of the remote Hereford
farms, granges, cider-presses &c. — a Miltonic roller or two, and such
like. The great poets, with whom MAN is always expressed or
implied, seem to have preferred such imagery to lumpish
mountains and leaden lakes; e.g. the "cider-press" in Keats's
Autumn. Believe me in haste, Yours most truly, S. PALMER.
LLX. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, October 21, 1867.
My dear Mr. Valpy. . . . The other day, at last, I think
the true " vision " came of The Prospect Milton, " Straight mine
eye hath caught new pleasure " &c. It is a very curious subject,

SAMUEL PALMER. 2,„
for there seems no medium between a mappy, Buckinghamshire
treatment, and a genial, poetic swoon. Between ourselves, and
trembling to say it, I think that Milton (with him a most
exceptional case), was a little halting between the two. The
mountain's "barren breast," and the ''meadows trim with daisies
pied," seem to jar a little.
Hard work must be some apology for my tardy correspond
ence. I am very glad to hear of your Hereford explorations, and the
turning up of those old " manor-houses " which add to land
scape a history, and humanity. The finest green-grocery gets
a lift when we imagine some of it gracing " King Alcinous'
Feast." We rise thus from ordinary landscape to the bucolic and
poetic, where " more is meant than meets the " eye. With the
poet, a single adjective has power to lengthen and dignify a river
course, suggest city and citadel at its estuary, and farther up,
disputed fords and foughten fields ; then, upward still among the
rocks and falls, the spirits of woods and streams, the fairies, and the
good old river-god. As an instance out of many, we may take
" That ANCIENT river the river Kishon " . . Yours, &c,
S. Palmer.

LX. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Furze Hill, 6th November, 1867.
My dear Mr. Valpy. . . . Added to the result of our dis
cussion on The [Haunted] Stream, I found out something after you
left which has put it all in my power. I have worked on it a little
to-day, most tenderly breaking those delicate crimson tones which,
in the little sketch, depress the saffron to a focus, and merging the
•extreme distance, as in the sketch, to a more mysterious purplish
gloom, and the result is that the city, which never pleased me, has
sprung up and asserted itself (I fancy) as the poetic eye of the
drawing. Your rock suggestion I am delighted with.
I shall want the little sketch as long as the drawing is in the
house and indeed for some time, as I hope to make a small
drawing with that sky and mountain as they are, according to my
u 2

292 THE LETTERS OF
first wish as to the use of it for the Penseroso, for what I think is
the finest suggestion in the poem, Saturn and Vesta solemnly
reposing in the Forest— secret shades of "Woody Ida's Inmost
Grove!' That, to me, is worth a great many " Towered Cities."
Think of the cedars ! [sketch]. Yet I think I have among my
studies a sky which would suit it even better than the amber..
That and " The Bellman's drousy charm " have an unutterable
going-in-itiveness. What a foolish digression ! You may depend on my attention
to the remarks, as in the former case.
That " Hymen " who has been the plague of my life, must be
turned as if going round the corner to the right. . . .
I had rather take time about The Stream, doing a little as I
quite feel it, for the last subtleties are so much better done this way,.
while other subjects are going on. Believe me ever, my dear Mr..
Valpy, Yours truly, S. Palmer.

LXI. To A. H. Palmer.
21st Sunday after Trinity, 1867.
My dear Herbert. If we rank in the moral scale above the-
noisier four-footed beasts, surely we shall be touched by the collect
for to-day, "— — pardon and peace . . . and serve thee with a
quiet mind."
The violets of the Lord's garden, the sweet, retiring souls who are
to be traced but by the fragrance of unobtrusive charities, have
been refreshed to-day by that collect, in many a remote dependency
and distant isle. As sometimes in mid-ocean, sometimes when
traversing the desert, men have plainly heard their native village-
bells ; so, to-day, far on either side of the equator, to the Lord's
little ones has that sweet collect chimed of " Heaven which is their
home." But suppose it should please our Master to convert us
wholly to Himself, so that you and I, dear Herbert, should one day
live together merrily in Heaven ; suppose we make up our minds at:
once to start together on pilgrimage — no sooner are we afoot, than
all sorts of hindrances molest us. First there's the Devil, for he is
not quite dead yet, though the German critics think they have made
away with him. Then there's the old man within us : the law im

SAMUEL PALMER.

2'J3

our members warring against the law of our minds. Then, evil
influences of example, and not least perhaps, to make a kind of
" bull," the evil example we set to ourselves. Then the habits of
modern domestic life, so arranged as to leave the least possible time
for all which is of the utmost possible moment. You are beginning
to learn a profession (a great Christian duty), and know how difficult
it is to get time free from interruption for that and the simplest
necessities of education. I call Latin a necessity of really
good education, for without it I do not think the best English
has ever been written or spoken : and as speech pre-eminently
distinguishes us from the brutes (I mean them no disrespect), we
ought surely to speak well. Some relish too of ancient and, still more,
[of] ecclesiastical history, and of heroic poesy, tends to make us
less despicably selfish than we might otherwise be, scraping carrion
•each to his own kennel : teaches us that we are members one of
another, and of the rational polity : expands us ; pulls us up out
of the ditch ; takes us up hill, and gives us a wider prospect, and
shows us why and how we should utter with yearning hearts, " Thy
kingdom come."
Your new acquaintance "Uriah Heep" would have been the
better for something of this, would he not ? Don't let us grovel, but
let our word be, " Upward — upward ! " Pray for your poor ailing
father, S. P.
LXII. To Mrs. Richard Redgrave.
Furze Hill, November 16, 1867.
My dear Mrs. Redgrave. I have been blessing every one I
could think of whose name begins with an R. for giving me a rich
evening's treat in Mr. Lowe's speech. You were the first friend 1
thought of; the " R. R. " fitted, if it had not been for that puzzling
" M " in the middle. To-day, Mrs. Palmer has solved the difficulty
by telling me that you have two given names. It was read again
last night, aloud, by a young friend who called, while I sat coiled
up before the fire blinking and almost purring, like a large cat.
An ad libitum of raspberry tarts is not more relished by a little
boy in the holidays.
It is delightful to meet with any intellectual quality in its per
fection, and Mr. Lowe seems to me to be the very sublime of clever-

294 THE LETTERS OF
ness. One cannot help transporting oneself to the lecture-hall, and
imagining the sharp practical eyes of the utilitarian majority of the
audience, who devour the whole as incontrovertible, sparkling with
triumph as he pours out his skirmishers upon the flanks of poor
Antiquity : — ' ' None of these ancient heroes e'er saw a cannon ball,
Or knew the force of powder to slay their foes withal ;
But our brave boys do know it, yet banish all their fears,
With the Tow row row de dow of the British Grenadiers."
There is no muddle about Mr. Lowe ; he is so clear-headed
and logical that you are much pleased if you much differ.
Grant his minor, and his famous reform speech was conclusive.
This on education is no less so, if we attach his meaning to the
one word "usefulness." But here people differ. King Alfred
himself was anything but a useful person in the eyes of the good
housewife who entrusted her cakes to his watching.
There is certainly much that is indefensible in our educational
system ; the shameful waste of time over Latin-verse making for
instance ; but Milton has gone into everything in his little Tractate
on Education, and I think we may there see how a master of the
Ideal, and he alone, can best treat of the expedient and the
actual. With many thanks, believe me, dear Mrs. Redgrave, Yours
most sincerely, SAMUEL PALMER.

1 808
LXII I. To Mr. John Giles.1
My dear JOHN; Lest they should have put me away and got
the house tidy before then, I wish you a Merry Christmas, 1 868,
and a Happy New Year, 1869. But as it is, I am turned out neck
and crop ior a couple of days or so ; for the " Helps " are going
away, and they say my den must be cleaned out before the new
ones come, and it is declined, the taking one step towards it,
while I am in the house, lest I should interfere with what of
course I don't understand. So I write, as you kindly bade me,
to ask if you would house me for a couple of nights if I come on
1 [Written on filigree paper stamped at the top with the Christmas and New Year's
greetings in ornamental letters.]

SAMUEL PALMER. ,05
Friday, but pardon me if, after all, combined hail and east wind
befall and stop my progress.
When I am " not Stephano " but a cramp, the unattached
blanket is precious ; our cook Jane, whose only fault was drinking,
told me of it, bless her heart : do /judge her ?
Could we get up a Maitland evening ? I fear not. Twelve
onions were got for that bullock's heart, and vou know the result.1
I'm sick of it all ; not of bullock's heart, or of onions, but of the draw
ing-room-genteel-life-servant-keeping system altogether ; and if I
were alone again, would build a vast, air)- hut on a dry soil in an
old fashioned town, where there was a wholesome cook-shop, and
be my own house-maid and char-woman.
Servants have been made what they are by the foolish example
of their " betters ; " but they are killing off their mistresses by
wholesale with the incessant worry. To think that, loving peace
and a simple life, one should be entangled in these things like a fly
in a tar-barrel — no settlement, no safety ; no improbability of the
house being set on fire any night in the week, by the " helps " falling
asleep over " The Illustrated Police A'ews ! " Well, it's work for
patience, and one in which patience may have her perfect work.
O ! happy Barrys ! thrice happy Alexander Selkirks, " if only
their happiness they knew" ! Well might Jansenius say that with
his Bible and St. Augustine's works, he could be perfectly happy in
a desert island. O ! what unspeakable pains do people take in
elaborating their own misery! Rich subject-matter for reflection,
which I hope we shall follow up in this very room together ere
long, for horrors are becoming my pastime. In the meantime
believe me, Dear John, Yours affectionately, the wretched S. P.
My pet narcissus, the eye of the garden, gone ! Virgilian nose
gays basketed off to Reigate to make bouquets for butcher-boys.
Do I then despise butcher-boys ? Heaven forbid ! One of the
"helps" nearly fainted from tight stays the other morning, and at
prayer-time too. I like that ; it's a sample of our modern Chris
tianity. A text for a sermon that I should like to preach the Sun
day after next, from the pulpit of Reigate church : but they've
gagged the laity. Filigree Folly, May 1868.
[' None were used. — Ed.]

296 THE LETTERS OF
LXIV. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, September, 1868.
My dear Mr. Valpy. ... I wish the Lucys had sent [to the
Leeds Exhibition] the pair of long Titians mentioned in my last note,
and that you could have seen Claude's Enchanted Castle. After all,
there is nobody like him when we get him at his best and uninjured.
I mean among the painters of pure landscape. Two things always
affect me in a great picture-gathering ; first — the vast amount of
power and knowledge ; next, a regret that it should comparatively
seldom have been devoted to the embodiment of sentiment, in the
higher sense of the word — that the love should seldom be found
in measure quite equal to the skill. I cannot but feel with you
that there is a sweet refreshment in the scenes of Fra Angelico :
nooks and dells of Paradise, where emulation, and power, and
learning and greatness, have become empty sounds. We can rest
there awhile, and return to the genuine sublime in design and
chiaroscuro, all the better for our retreat — if indeed the humble
heavenly love which he depicts be not of all great things the
greatest. . . . S. PALMER.
LXV. To the ReV. J. P. Wright.
Furze Hill, September 1868.
Dear Mr. Wright. I can't let Herbert's letter go without one
line to thank you for your kindness to him on this and on other
' occasions. Happy are those who have whooped and measled satisfactorily,
and had small-pox three times, like the Rev. Vice-Principal of the
English College at Rome.1 These things are not in my depart
ment, nor do I interfere with the sanitary jurisdiction, but I am
not without hope that A. ' H. may one day investigate Winchester
cathedral under your guidance.
Upon some matters whereon pulpits are strangely silent, it has
pleased Him who "girded Cyrus " to make The Saturday Review
a " preacher of righteousness." I hope you will read The
Fashionable Woman, No. 667, August 8th, 1868, page 184. This,
and the next following article, Sermons on Sermons, p. 186, indicate
[ ' Mr. William Giles, my father's cousin. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 297
such a widely -spread declension in faith and morals as to suggest
in vulgar phrase but sad reality, that we are - going to the Devil "
very fast indeed.
If, with connivance or only feeble protests from the clergy
(observe the " if"), educated Christians are becoming less religious
than the average Pagan of antiquit)- ; if they are becoming almost
as licentious and far more frivolous and foolish, the evidences of
Christianity become practically damaged ; met with a formidable
cui bono ?
What some call the " sins of folly " entail more misery and
ruin than sins of malignity, because there are so many more
sinners. How many acquaintances can we tell off on our fingers
who will dare to be singular ; who will draw a line, and halt, and
say "No"?
But to tell off those who will be sure to " follow a multitude to
do evil," if it be only a fashionable multitude, we need have the
fingers of Briareus.
I think we should earnestly thank God for having influenced
the hearts and guided the pens which have laboured of late in The
Saturday Review to sta)-, ifit be possible, the deterioration of our
fair country-women ; for, unless the care of young children be
wholly deputed to hirelings, the mothers of this generation make
the morals of the men and women of the next.
I was much interested by Professor Tyndal's address at
Norwich, reported in The Atheneeum, and hope the latter part
will repress the flippancy of many a young materialist. Even if
we grant that the crystal, the passion-flower, the mature man even,
are built up by atoms acting by purely mechanical laws or
chemical affinities and antagonisms (and we cannot yet define
either " chemical " or " mechanical "), it redounds but the more
to the glory of His wisdom who devised such laws and made such
atoms. Except figuratively, however, the word " law " is sheer
nonsense, for law can only act upon an intelligent patient.
The " laws of nature " are the usage or habit of nature put into
poetry, I think. The atoms which compose an apple falling to the
ground or a pickpocket knocked into the kennel are not really
obeying a law, but gravitating by an impulse : nor did Newton
conceive that gravitation could do its work without a Divine
Omnipresence.

298 THE LETTERS OF
A bit of rubbed sealing-wax applied to scraps of paper
suspends the LAW of gravitation with impunity, and are we to
demand oi the Almighty howhe made the iron swim? Believe me
in haste, Yours most truly, S. Palmer.
-— ~^.\ T869
' LXVl.i To A Young Clergyman.
V / February, 1869.
My dear % # # The matters touched on in your
letter being all-important, I take a large sheet. If I put what
strikes me in the form of assertion, it is merely for brevity's sake.
I so fully intended to acknowledge my pleasure in reading
your article in the  that I thought I had done so. What if
you took Bunyan's Life of Badman ? As a scarcely-known work
of an all-known author it might fairly class with curious old books.
I have it not, alas ! . . .
I wish some clerical Alcides would slay that three-headed
Cerberus the " Sermon." The word has gradually changed its
meaning, narrowing from a discourse into a particular kind of
essay. And " discourse " itself is not large enough to include
preaching in some of its best senses — exhortation, persuasion, &c.
However, it is our constant tendency in backing from an obstruc
tion on one side of the way to upset into a ditch on the other ; and
he is to be pitied who undervalues our exegetical divinity, so
much of which as was extant in his time was venerated by Lord
Bacon. And how much have we had since, down to our own times !
Take Bishop Horsley's sermons — naming one example at random
among multitudes. We are most prone to this backing when we
are angry, and then it is, I think, that we should seek for the DRY
LIGHT which Pythagoras preferred— intellectual perception not
obfuscated by the passions.
I quite agree with you that when a clergyman has not had
time to write a sermon, and is not in energy for the extempore, he
should take a printed one into the pulpit ; telling the people who
wrote it when it is finished ; which will keep alive curiosity and
therefore attention— Attention the daughter of Curiosity, who
seldom can be prevailed upon to go anywhere without her mother.
Why are The Homilies never read ? There is an excellent one

SAMUEL PALMER. ;,,,,
upon dress. By the bye, Mr. Giles told me that one of them was
by Bishop Bonner.
I think that he should have been modeiately whipped who said
that orthodoxy was (one almost trembles to write it) the sin
against the Holy Ghost. Surely hyperbole or any other rhetorical
figure is out of place in such connection : and, to digress from such
rhetoric, I remember my father many times expressing his wonder
that divines should have raised such a mischievous, nay poisonous
dust about a subject so dreadfully clear. They were not to be
forgiven who, seeing our Lord's miracles, attributed them to Satan.
Now I remember having, when a child, been taken to visit a lad)- who
had been in a madhouse, distracted with the fear that she had com
mitted that sin. So much for impertinent inferences, however bale-
fully ingenious, drawn from Scripture. As to the thing meant by
your rhetorician, orthodox)- (doubtless you remember Bishop
Warburton's definition of it), like everything else, is a bad thing
in bad hands. It is a weapon of petty persecution in the hands of
petty bigots, and the most orthodox man in the world, if he be not
a dullard and a dummy, is liable to the charge of heterodoxy and
even atheism, if he write an original and brilliant defence even of
orthodoxy itself. I believe Cudworth may be instanced.
Without defending The Tale of a Tub it may be mentioned as at
once the most powerful satire upon Romanism, and the handle by
which Swift was excluded from the Bench by a protestant arch
bishop — the internal evidence making it more than probable that
Swift was the author. I can never think of that great man with
out nauseating Thackeray's depreciation. Think of Gulliver's
Travels. Who would not have crawled on his hands and knees
across Central Asia to have written that book ?
To be safe, a clergyman must be dull — any man must be dull,
or else supremely wise. " The point of danger is the point of
victory," but if we love this side of the medallion very much it
may not perhaps be amiss to inscribe on the reverse, " The point
of victory is also the point of danger : " too headlong a pursuit of
the enemy has sometimes exchanged conquest for disaster.
The sorrows you express are such as ought to find sympathy
in every Christian breast. " We have not dared," you say, " to
rebuke them for their sins." Does not this arise in part from a
compliant partnership with their levities? What clergyman can

300

THE LETTERS OF

" rebuke " at noon his partner in the dance at two o'clock of that
very morning ? Should not a pastor be at least rather a drag upon
the wheel of Fashion than her running footman ?
Might not Law's Serious Call be looked into a little by district-
visiting ladies and others. If we bend the bow too tightly, are
not things in such a state just now that nothing less will get them
right. I do not know that ladies would think the better of it for
Dr. Johnson's verdict, who said it was the finest piece of hortatory
theology in our language. It used to be, and probably is circulated
by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge.
Deplorable, however, as are the encroachments of a tasteless
dissipation upon all that is most precious in English domestic life,
there is yet a viler and more alarming defection : I mean that air
of independence of God which leavens so much of our periodical
literature : difficult, as a negative, to find in any paragraph, yet as
to the tendency of the whole, expressed by the prophet Daniel
" — the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways,
hast thou not glorified." The superstitious reluctance of the
Romans to begin great undertakings without careful auguries
were a blessed piety compared with this self-sufficient godlessness,
of which, sown broadcast over Europe, we have the blade and the
ear in the late French poisonings : and God grant that ere we see
the ripened crop of this hellish harvest, His Blessed Son may come
and visibly take those honours and that kingdom which we pray
Him to hasten every time we say the prayer which Himself put
into our mouths. As to the moral amelioration of the world by
education and the like, it is fanciful rubbish concocted in the darkest
ignorance of the human heart.
And now, your frank, earnest and much-valued letter (which I
show to no one), leads on to something very serious indeed. You
say, " I believe He has given me personally a certain message
to God's people." And again, " He has given me a word to speak
and I will not keep silence." Now if you say this, not rhetorically,
but as a simple statement of fact, surely there is no cause for
" grief ; " but rather for thankfulness in that He who has already
bestowed on you that MORE EXCELLENT gift of Charity, is
adding a Pentecostal gift of prophecy (in the large sense of the
word), and putting a word into your mouth which you may deliver
in the power of the Spirit.

SAMUEL PALMER. joi
As however these living waters, passing like a mountain
affluent into the turbid current of our own fallible wills and
understanding, are always subject to deterioration, evil spirits will
be on the watch to pervert the whole. Hence is the wisdom of
God most manifest in putting the tests whereby we are to "try the
spirits" into the mouths of St. John and St. Paul. The " beloved
disciple " surely knew " the mind of Christ," and he gives the test of
the Incarnation. St. Paul also, who was caught up into the third
Heaven, MUST have known what doctrine was heavenly, and he
says let even an angel from Heaven be anathema who teaches any
other gospel. Man)- speak as if the ONE gospel into which the
angels desire to look were narrow and contracted. To me it seems
so vast a universe of truth and love as only eternity is long enough
to explore. If you receive a message which seems inconsistent with
some isolated text, perhaps it is not more so than some other
isolated text which elsewhere might be found.
That wondrously beautiful passage in the fifty-eighth of Isaiah
describing the inner part and " thing signified " in fasting, may seem
to clash with Lenten abstinence and Lenten services ; but does it
do more than bring to light the meaning — the soul of which they
are the body ?
Prophetic gifts seem to clash and may really clash with the
fallible maxims of a visible Church, particularly with those of a
national one, but I would rather look at the Anglican Church as a
protected orchard, in which the gifts of the Spirit may be permitted
to ripen, if that submission be observed towards those who sit in the
Apostles' seats, which our Lord commanded towards those who sat
in Moses' seat, and were soon to crucify the Lord of Glory. Nothing
under the sun is new, and the Jewish Church, as a corporate body,
always held the Prophets in antagonism, just as a newly-sent
prophet now must be unintelligible to a public school head master
promoted to be a Lord Bishop. But a certain degree of antagonism
is wholesome ; and real revelations have sometimes, perhaps,
degenerated into fanaticism for want of due restriction, humility
and obedience.
The glory of the poet's art is that he converts the BONDS
of metre into indispensable conditions of perfect beauty. You
speak of " old formulas " : being old myself, excuse me if I do not
quite relish this. Why are they the worse for being old ? If they

302 THE LETTERS OF
are as old as the Apostles they are the more likely to be genuine.
And if old formulas be unsatisfactory, what STUFF new
formulas would be ! If we want a new gospel there is a
beautiful one made to our hands — -Swedenborgianism. My natural
man delights in it (the natural man loves pleasant visions) : no
wrath in God, no Vicarious Sacrifice (the universal belief of all
ages and countries), but an' entirely benevolent system according
to our notions of benevolence. Now our notions of a benev
olent Creator are upset at once by the physical phenomena :
the late earthquake at Quito for instance. We should not
have permitted such a thing ; but " My ways are not your
ways, saith the Lord." We MUST humble ourselves, and
believe, and WAIT.
I would be the last to sneer at Swedenborg. Many are the
beautiful things in his writings. I doubt not that he saw and con
versed with the spiritual world. ' But it may be that in the spiritual
world there are spirits which are fallible — partly in error though
not malignant. Swedenborg thoroughly believed that our Lord
came in the flesh. Blake was I think misled by erroneous spirits. I
knew an instance- in which an accomplished mind could not be per
suaded to accept as an article of faith the " coming in the flesh."
The final result was a devout paganism. I do not use the words
reproachfully, but literally, and without comment.
You say, " I believe in an inspiration of all God's people, as true
and as real as the inspiration of the writers of the Bible." In a
certain sense this is very true. Our blessed Lord says, " He
shall teach you all things." But it makes me uncomfortable, be
cause it is so like the talk of the Mountites, who use our Lord's
blessed sermon as a wall behind which to skulk while they are
throwing stones at St. Paul.
In the early part of your letter you express just indignation at
falsehood. What, I would ask, is the falsehood of taking a litho
graph sermon into the pulpit to the dishonesty of holding up the
Bible as a text-book — annotating on and preaching from it, when
teaching a religion palpably opposed to its letter and if possible
even more to its whole meaning, and spirit, and tendency ? As
surely as Hippocrates wrote on medicine and the Georgics treat of
agriculture, so surely is the Vicarious Sacrifice the very spine and
marrow of Holy Scripture, from the day when it was promised that

t,

S A M UE I I ¦ A L .VE R. 303
the seed of the woman should bruise the Serpent's head, to the
apocalyptic hymn, " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain."
I delight to think that you have '" passed the Rubicon," and by
your distinct avowal, have separated from the respectables --have
become in short, what they would call a fanatic ; but I think you
will do your congregation most good by not informing them of it,
lest, to your own annoyance and their own greater hurt, you should
have to say with Milton,
"  this is got In casting pearl lo hogs."
I do not mean " conceal your message," but only honour it with all
circumspection and prudence. At the same time I must crave
pardon for saying that your letter brings to my mind what may be
read in the Bacchm of Euripides, when Pentheus met his mother and
her comrades in the wood,
" Then Pentheus --aw that he wa, near calamity."
However, he who leaves the mud for the mountain is nearing
calamity in the very act. The more needful to be provided with
spiked pole and mountain boots ; and supposing that Providence
had provided him with an INFALLIBLE CHART, it would be
unwise to leave it behind, even though he had a direct inward assur
ance of safety. For in both the physical and moral universe,
assured ends are realized by conditional means. St Paul's [ship's
company] was to be saved ; yet he says, " Except these abide in
the ship, ye cannot be saved."
Letter writing is most distasteful to me, much more the appar
ent egotism of so long a letter as this, but it was forced from me
by a sense of duty, lamely as I was aware I should discharge it.
One or two of your expressions which seem to me exception
able are, in the very letter, what dear friends have expressed to me
years ago ; and in some of these cases, with all apparent spiritual
ity, the outcome was such as it gives one pain to remember.
As you can best " glorify God in your body and spirit " when
your body is in sound health, I hope you will not abate one jot of
that soundness by intemperate fasting. I know a Roman Catholic
dignitary who is obliged to have a dispensation and to eat meat,
simply because he cannot do his work without it.
Probably you saw that extraordinary pamphlet by a learned
Roman Catholic against papal infallibility &c. which was reviewed

304 THE LETTERS OF
in The Times about Christmas-time. He shows that, whereas they
charge us with lay subjection, his own Church has been even more
king-ridden. I cannot recollect the author's name. It is in the
form of a letter to Dr. Manning. It was placed immediately on
the Roman Index.
Please remember me and mine sometimes in your prayers, and
believe me (writing perhaps for the last time), Yours most
truly, S. Palmer.

LXVII. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, March 16, 1869.
My dear Mr. Valpy  I should have much enjoyed the
meeting you so kindly asked me to attend, for though I do not
think our blessed Christian Sunday is the Sabbath Day (seeing,
among other reasons, that the primitive Jewish converts kept both),
yet I fear that the opening of exhibitions would lead to the open
ing of theatres, and in the long run produce the Parisian Sunday,
which is a day of rest for nobody : and the Christian Sunday was
doubtless meant to number the weekly rest among its blessings,
though many of the early Christians were obliged to work all
through it, going early in the morning to the " Breaking of
Bread." The Church, unlike the hypocritical Pharisees, permits the
reaping to go on in critical weather, and does not prohibit the
doing of good.
Judaizing notions have made Sunday very miserable to chil
dren, some parents having actually put away the toys on Saturday
evening. A little child brought up in this way asked its mother
what Heaven was like. " My love," said mama, " Heaven is a
perpetual Sabbath." On which the poor little thing expressed a
wish that, when she died, she might go elsewhere ! Martin Luther,
on the other hand, writes to his little child that if he went to
Heaven he would have toys and drums and hobby-horses, as many
as heart could wish (I quote from memory) ; and he declared that
he would go out hunting on Sunday, if people would insist on con
founding it with the Sabbath.
If it did not involve keeping so many attendants from their

SAMUEL PALMER. 305
weekly rest, I should like to see august cathedral services in pure
air and in the most beautiful buildings, richly furnished with high
art, where the people could either take their food with them, or buy
it reasonably on the spot ; and I would select the ablest extem
pore preachers to deliver short addresses.
Yet I have always set my face against the indiscriminate
opening of galleries on Sunday, and refused to sign petitions in
dustriously circulated with that object.
.... Only think, the British Museum has bought Mr. Pye's
variorum Liber Studiorum. I shall not forget the delight with
which he showed us some of them at Mr. Field's.
With best remembrances to Mrs. Yalpy, believe me, Yours most
truly, S. Palmer.

LXVIII.

To Miss Frances Redgrave.

September, l£

My DEAR SISSY. I must thank you very heartily for the kind
pains you took in getting the Anatomy. It is the same which I
saw and, so far as the bones and muscles go, invaluable : as to the
manner of finally clothing them the author's views are singular,
and would not quite meet Michelangiolo's views (thus dear Fuseli 1
spells him), but that is of little consequence, as it is for those bones
and muscles that we want it. I wish I had been well flogged
when somewhat younger, and made to copy every one of them.
We have also a fine copy of Albinus ; so we are like — or to
speak for myself, I am like a young minister who went to a
venerable elder to ask what books he should read : " O Ivemy,
Ivemy," said the big-wigged dignitary, " You don't want books —
you want brains ! " I have just brains enough to perceive that
books are the cheapest things to be bought in this world, beyond
all comparison. Only think that one can buy that Fau's Anatomy
for a quarter the price of a swallow-tailed dress coat to sip coffee
and make oneself ridiculous in. . . .
Good Words, July 1, 1869, contains an excellent lecture by
1 To this day I remember vividly his small picture of Psyche coming to the Fates. With
much mannerism and some bombast, he yet indelibly impresses the memory, and it is
a most touching and gratifying compliment to be thought a fool for admiring him.

306 THE LETTERS OF
Kingsley on The Two Breaths. It is, I think, the duty of everyone
who reads it to recommend it to every young lady he sees, for
he deals with the TIGHT LACING CURSE. Yes, I say
CURSE, and I mean it, and wonder how Kingsley could have
done his duty so thoroughly and at the same time have kept his.
temper so well : he is leniently inclined to excuse it on the plea of
our very incomplete civilization, yet he says forty years of warning
have proved useless, which argues much moral perverseness. He
is amused at the peals of laughter with which a tight-waisted
female would have been greeted by the ladies of Attica. I have
the honour to have long shared this ludicrous vision with Mr.
Kingsley, and to have imagined the very fish-women of the Piraeus
pelting her with sea-weed.
Excuse great haste, and with love to all, believe me, Ever
truly yours, S. PALMER.

LXIX. To Mr. George Richmond.
/
[Red Hill] December, 1869. Almost to-morrow morning.
My dear Friend. It is too late almost to reciprocate your
kind Christmas wishes, but not [for] those to yourself and all in York
Street as to a new year ; with like remembrances to the young
lady who has " sloped her westering wheel " towards Bayswater. 1
All this from the bottom of my heart ! As for affairs in general
I hate to write, and hate to speak, now that English words mean
just the reverses of what they used to signify.
Plunder, sacrilege, infidelity, have become the synonyms of
philanthropy and intelligence, and one is considered a born fool
for not perceiving it immediately.
I was told that a " leading journal " can muster from among
its contributors enough professed atheists to form a cheerful
dinner-party. When we are instructed that there ought to be a few infidel
bishops by way of variety we feel humbled, like the Devonshire
rustic rebuked by his neighbour just returned ; " Y'm a fool mun ;
you've not seen Lunnon."
[ ' My father's old pupil, Miss Julia Richmond, now Mrs. Robinson. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 307
However, we are not quite so far advanced just yet, and I was
pleased to hear that a newly appointed prelate, directly the Essays
appeared, advised his sixth form not to read them, and expressed
to the other masters his deep regret for being mixed up with them.
There is nothing really new about Rationalism ; it is only
infidelity with a fraudulent label. But the infidels of the 17th
century did not call themselves advanced Christians, and get
Church preferment on the strength of it.
To patronize Christianity as a thing that was very useful for the
dark ages but is now behind our requirements argues a folly equal
to its profanity. Surely the Bible is either infinitely true, or a
persistent aggregation of the most audacious falsehoods which
were ever palmed upon mankind.
How is it that educated — highly educated people, don't see this ?
If St. Paul were in error as to such fundamental truths as the
Vicarious Sacrifice and justification, then it follows that he was con
verted and selected to be sent to the Gentiles with lies in his right
hand. But why should I run on thus ? Perhaps it is bad temper,
vexed to find that the little I thought I knew of the English
language has all to be unlearned, and that every one must wait
for a new dictionary. I keep four in my room, including Johnson's
in extenso, but they must all go into the fire, and I must go to bed
forthwith, with many apologies for my garrulity. Applying to
myself the words of the wise man, " a prating fool shall fall," I
remain, with best love to all, Yours affectionately, S. Palmer.

1870
LX'x. To Mrs. George.
Red Hill, October, 1870.
My dear Mrs. George. I can't grub about here like a hog
crunching acorns, without feebly endeavouring to express my sense
of your generosity. It is said that souls like yours feel as much
pleasure in giving, as mob-made souls, whether royal, patrician, or
plebeian, in receiving. But I have been wondering whether it is
possible that even you can have felt as much delight in sending
Herbert that splendid fowling-piece as he in its fruition. . . .
It was a grand moment yesterday, the showing it to the Alma
x 2

308 THE LETTERS OF
veteran, Herbert's drill- master. The Sergeant thought the stock
quite a master-piece, and kept fondling it after the manner of a
doll. Would that the French and Prussians were playing with dolls
at this moment, instead of waging one of the most needless, reck
less, and profligate wars which will have to be recorded in modern
history ; rendering, through all time, the hatred of these contiguous
nations equally intense and inextinguishable. Since the moral
millennium people about 1844 were prophesying, in their blind
ignorance of human nature, a lasting and almost immediate paci
fication of the world, there have been little else but wars and
tumults, and I think there is every reason to fear that it will grow
worse and worse, till the end of the present dispensation.
The majority are not good : Education may make them wiser,
but not better; for though it may refine and elevate the intellect
it can never change the heart.
Now " knowledge is power." Therefore, by educating, we
increase the power of a creature who is not good. Hence it will
result that though people will become too wise to suffer encum
brance of national debts for wars like this, they will be more war
like and more formidable than ever where there seems the certainty
of a very great gain, or a very great revenge.
Not that I depreciate education : on the contrary, the subject
is my hobby ; but mere secular education, though it will withdraw
people somewhat from the more gross and vulgar vices, will rather
increase than assuage pride and ambition, two great movers of
war. Great knowledge is always humble, but among the masses of
the best educated few will ever attain to greatness ; and it is as
symptomatic of the vastly clever, well-informed man to be proud,
as of the great man to be humble.
You seem to be, like myself, " lashed to the helm " of home ;
yet it is a pity that you should not get a glimpse of our green fields
ere they are mantled in snow. How I should enjoy another morn
ing among your books.
Only think of your rat family in the dresser drawer ! I knew a
very poor old man in Kent who had been a smuggler. Life had
passed roughly, yet he had one, only one comfort left, a rat-
pudding ! He took no steps to catch them; but, governing his
appetite by patience, calmly awaited the desired return of the

SAMUEL PALMER. 309
village rat-catcher. Then, having carefully cleaned, skinned and
prepared his delicacies, the difficulty was always where to borrow a
saucepan ; for the petticoat government of his wife and daughter
debarred him from the use of his own utensils. However, he
always found some neighbour or other kind enough to supply him,
and at last he sat down, with a thankful heart I believe, to the only
solace left him until that last one of the sexton and the spade.
We are such geese of routine, such fools of fashion, that if rat-pie
— I beg pardon, tart1 is the genteel word ; — if rat-tart became a
favourite at Balmoral, in a short time the)- would be seen on every
dinner-table in London, with the tails elegantly coiled and
arranged outside the crust, like the claws on a pigeon pie — there I
go again — pigeon tart I mean. What a thing it is to be naturally
vulgar !
When at Margate with Herbert, I had peculiar opportunities of
collecting evidence as to haunted houses, and spent almost the most
interesting evening of my life, in a family meeting (convened for
the purpose), of alleged eye-witnesses. My impression was that,
making all allowance for imposture and mistake, there was a
residuum of evidence which no candid mind could resist. I think
you must have some curious information on the subject, and should
like to talk it over with you. Meanwhile, believe me, Yours
affectionately, S. Palmer.
LXaXI. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
( [Red Hill] December 13, 1870.
My dear Mr. Valpy. Recovered sufficiently to get to work
again, though not to write much, I just send this line to say that
every day henceforth of delay in sending The Curfew will be a
day in some part of which it has been actually ripening. Having
detained it so long, I make a point of conscience of looking at it
the first thing every morning. It has been much worked upon
since we saw it together, and it is in a state corresponding with
The Comely Cloud1 just before its last completion, and I think it
will quite reach the same mark.
It is now getting more and more at every touch of the solemn
1 How beautiful a thing is refinement! What a difference between " Rump-stc-ak-
pie"and "OX TART!"
p Known also as Morning and The dripping Eaves. —Ed.]

3io

THE LETTERS OF

fusion belonging to the theme ; and directly it reaches that point at
which it is an even chance whether another touch would do it
harm or good, I will send it. But a good many dreamy half hours
may be indulged in before there is a chance of harm.
The eye now rests undisturbed upon the minster tower, which
looks quite another thing though not a touch has been added
to it. I am too weary to write more, but, with kindest remembrances
to Mrs. Valpy, remain, Yours very truly, S. PALMER.

1871
LXXII. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, January 1, 1871.
My DEAR Mr. VALPY. Your very kind letter was brought
me just as I had succeeded in pleasing myself with a passage in
Waters Murmuring, which would have been finished some time
ago, but that I thought, by preliminary study, I could make it
hang upon qualities which would perhaps turn out an original
work. . . .
I must, if possible, get a glimpse of the Old Masters, and yet
I must not catch cold. . . . No student of eighteen could be
more loth than I to lose any opportunity of improvement by the
study of the Great Masters, and I manage in the spring and
summer to see the most eligible collections that are open ; and in
winter am not without means of reference by prints at home.
I talk thus reluctantly about myself, lest a friend whose good
opinion I so much esteem should suppose me apathetic — as good
suppose that I had taken to drinking !
It is curious to find how a habit of quick observation may be
engendered by the briefness of opportunity ; and it is thus perhaps,
that the brevity of this life should urge to vigorous preparation for
the next. Though a new year should be begun in thankfulness
for a twelve-month of mercies elapsed, yet it always affects me
with awe. Indeed the little hand of a watch which marks the
seconds does the same. Time is so lelentless, he will not stop for
us a single moment. " He who works against time " — no, I think it
is " He who runs a race with Time," says Dr. Johnson, " has an
antagonist who is not subject to casualties."

SAMUEL PALMER. 311
I feel nearly sure, by the manner in which it affects you, that
the forty-five thousand pounder is apocryphal. The nine thousand
pounder always affects me in the same way. It is Raffaelle's
design and is beautifully done ; but " beautifully done " is not
exactly what we say of a real Raphael (or Raffaelle — Raffaello is
best). In all his genuine pictures there is an unction in the doing.
I heard a first-rate judge say, " I can't bear so and so's works
because they are so perfect." This spurious kind of perfection is
vastly popular with the populace of picture-buyers ; partly because
it makes such neat furniture, and goes so well with the uphol
stery — with chignons, crinoline, " corsets," sonnets to deceased
lap-dogs, and sermons to " respectable " congregations in pro
prietary chapels ; but I think neither you nor I have ever been
taken with it.
I think the Pope Julius, II. which hangs aloft, is a genuine
Raffaelle ; if a duplicate, vet relishing unmistakably of his own
handiwork. The tassels of the chair are impasted like Rembrandt.
I have seen it close, and once began a copy of it.
Excepting when he was under strong Florentine influence
Raffaelle was either soft and tender, as in his early pictures
influenced by Perugino, or rich and full, as in the little picture of
The Vision of Ezekiel. Nay, there is a charming richness in the
handling of some of his early pictures, as in The Agony in t/ie
Garden, though Rubens-minded people would think it drier than
burnt bones . . . S. Palmer.

LXXIII. To Mr. Bryan Hook. Red Hill, June, 1871.
My dear Bryan. You and I are such old friends that I quite
missed you at " Silverbeck " : however, your brother did every
thing that was kind to console me. I saw the magic boat, which
transformed your visitor into the " Lady of the Lake," 1 and, for my
own purposes, should prefer a venture in the Norwegian craft. The
tree-frogs are flourishing, and in fine voice.
[' Mr. Hook's amphibious sons, never happier than when in the water, used some
times to tempt visitors into some more or less crank craft on the ponds. ^The attendant
catastrophes are, to this day, proverbial. — Ed.]

3I2 THE LETTERS OF
I have been train-waiting twice at Guildford, but in school
hours ; so it would have been useless to call at the school unless
they would have taken me in and taught me something, which
would have been a great temptation, for the older we get the more'
we lament our own ignorance and lost time when we were young
and had the opportunity. However, Flaxman used to say, " It is
never too late to become wiser and better," and Herbert and I had
a great treat these last winter evenings, brushing up our Arith
metic out of Colenso. 1 For it is all a mistake about Grammars or
mathematics being Dry (I put a capital G. by mistake, but it is so
momentous a word that all its letters should be capitals) : they are
as wet as a plum-pudding-cloth when it comes out of the sauce
pan, if we were not loth to untie it that we might get at the
pudding. But supposing that they are dry ; so is the shell of a
walnut, or of a cocoa-nut ; yet we crack and hammer away to get
at the good stuff inside. I believe there are no school studies
which would not be purely delightful if we would only form the
habit of fixing the attention. The late Joseph John Gurney said
to some one in whom he took an interest, " If you would succeed
in life, give your whole mind to one thing at one time."
I would add, whenever there are two things to be done, do the
more unpleasant first. Just try this for a year. But what am I
saying ? Perhaps you are doing it with a will, much better than I,
and will call me a fusty, rusty, musty old " fogy " for my pains.
I fear that " fogy " is slang ; it is in Webster but not in Johnson.
Webster's definition is " a dull old fellow " ; but if we take that of
a pocket edition, " a stickler for old things," it is not a term of
reproach, unless the old things are also bad. But a stickler for
mere secular education is a fogy : Eve tried it, with the Serpent for
her tutor. An atheist is a fogy ; he is a stickler for the old creed of
David's " fool," who " hath said in his heart, there is no God."
He who gainsays or slights the miracles of holy Scripture is a
fogy ; he is a stickler for ancient Pharaoh whose heart was hardened,
even after the seven plagues. He who says there is no Devil is a
fogy — a stickler for the old Sadducees who said there was " neither
angel, nor spirit."
There is nothing new in infidelity ; suppose that I read in some
new book that men were once baboons ; it is merely a slight im-
My father succeeded in making even Colenso palatable. — Ed.]

SA MUE L P A I. ME R. 3 1 3
provement on Lord Monboddo who, more than a century ago,
fancied that men once had tails.
The vamped up arguments against miracles were familiar to me
when I was fourteen, and perhaps I thought it man!)- to be a bit of
a free-thinker! But at that time, unbelievers were honest enough
to avow their unbelief: some of them now profess to be advanced
Christians ! What is Rationalism but infidelity with a fraudulent
label ?
I rejoice to hear that you are about to be confirmed, for with
that ordinance rightly received you will gain two kinds of strength ;
strength of conscience to resist temptations to sin, and power of
spiritual discernment to detect the hollowness and sophistry of
" oppositions of Science falsely so called " ; of experimental science
for instance ; which, being conversant with material phenomena,
ventures to gainsay those of the spiritual world, with the conditions
of which they have, perhaps, nothing in common, except the rela
tions of subjects to a master ; for spirit has the power of command
ing matter and sometimes of suspending its ordinary conditions,
commonly called laws ; law, as applied to matter, being a conve
nient term, purely figurative ; for literal law can act only on a
sentient being.
It would have been furthest from my thoughts to touch upon
these subjects, did I not know that our whole mental and moral
atmosphere is just now recking with infidelity. Our colleges, our
schools, and alas, some of our pulpits are full of it. I take up a
so-called religious book ; I read beautiful things about our Lord,
beautiful things about the Sermon on the Mount, but ere long I
discover that the writer has entrenched himself behind the Mount
to throw stones at St. Paul. I meet with some stranger who talks
very finely about the New Testament and does not believe a word
of the Old. Another tells me (I shudder to write it) that the
Gospel of the New Testament was good enough for the people of
those times, but is now behind our requirements ; but a third
wiseacre steps in and is good enough to patronize the Gospel ! —
suggesting that it is really in its nature elastic, and meant to be
drawn out of shape at pleasure, so as to fit our improving stature-
through every vagary of abnormal growth.
This is no laughing matter to us, but will not He that dwelleth
in Heaven laugh them to scorn who fancy that they have given

314 THE LETTERS OF
the go-by to a faith which commanded the supreme reverence of
such intellects as those of Augustine, Anselm, Bacon, Milton, Dante,
Barrow, Pascal, Newton ? Would these men have thrown away
their Bibles because coral-reefs took a long time in forming, or
somebody fancied himself the grandson of an ape ?
There is one view of confirmation which will commend itself to
the young Englishmen of our grammar-schools. We are a warlike
people, and our young men do not like sneaks, but prefer a fair
stand-up fight. Now Christianity adapts and hallows this instinct
of our nature. In confirmation you personally enlist as "Christ's
Soldier." You burnish up your armour, above all things taking
the Shield of Faith (whatever efforts may have been made to rob
you of it), and in God's strength wield for yourself the sword
which was laid up for you in baptism.
And never was there a time when the army of God stood more
in need of soldiers, of young soldiers too. I think it was Dr.
Arnold who said " Shame be to the boy who is ashamed to say his
prayers " ; we may add, all honour to the brave Christian boy who
" rejoices to suffer shame " for Him to Whom he has given his
heart. Religion implies no grimacing or hypocrisy ; a peaceful
conscience makes a merry heart, and penitence itself is but like the
showery morning of a bright, spring day.
Forgive this long preachment, written in haste, and I dare say
full of mistakes, and believe me to be, Affectionately yours,
S. Palmer.
LXXIV. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
Furze Hill, July 8, 1871.
My dear Mr. Hamerton. "The Little Corporal" would
have upset two or three dynasties while I have been debating
with myself whether or not it is possible for me to find time for
the etching. Inclination says, " If you can't find the time, make it ; "
and a subject has occurred to me which would be the very thing
for the purpose.
If this kind of needlework could be made fairly remunerative,
1 should be content to do nothing else, so curiously attractive is
the teazing, temper-trying, yet fascinating copper. But my etchings
consume much time, and I am not alone in discovering that, like

SAMUEL PALMER. 315
the cash absorbed by bricks and mortar, the final amount often
doubles the estimate: and this time has to be withdrawn from
commissions which are really lucrative. 1 ran get mo guineas for
quite a small drawing which does not occupy nearly the time of
some of my etchings ; but I am purchasable, perhaps, not only for
one, but for a small scries of larger etchings, which are in contem
plation, on terms which would be just to my family. . . .
As to skies we are fellow-sufferers. I have been in the habitof
sketching clouds in pencil as thev passed ; and perhaps the shadow
we are thus obliged to put in rapidly and delicately may suggest
a simple and natural method for etching ; besides keeping in our
memory the structure, and linear, as well as the aerial perspective
of the various layers of cloud.
Bonasoni is to me the great copper master of shadows : he
never commits the grievous fault of making shadow, as such, rich
and of a positive texture ; and his lines, if not etched, as I have
sometimes suspected, are more like etching than those of any other
engraver. I am inclined to think that, in cloud-shadowing, long lines should
be avoided, and that the short ones would naturally vary somewhat
in direction, and that cross hatching should be used very sparingly.
In complicated skies, I doubt whether much can be done without
frequent stoppings-out and rebitings. The most precious thing I
was ever taught seems to be this ; " One day of stopping-out is
worth five with the needle ; '' and this, quite irrespective of the style
of work as to more or less pronunciation of line. Directly we think
of a real organized sky, the whole condition of work is changed,
and quite a new scale of study and force elsewhere is demanded to
support it. I believe it is now discovered that Rembrandt spent
years upon his etchings; but, being himself essentially "picturesque,''
he never shows painful labour, but seems to be amusing himself
after a delightful manner.
I shall be anxious to see your new work, having derived so
much pleasure from the former one, the practical part of which I
was consulting with much care only the other day.
I have just watched cloud-cast shadows over a distance, from
my window, and see that the way to etch that common but beauti
ful phenomenon would be to draw the subject-matter completely ;
then to bite it in ; and having laid a new ground, to etch the

316 THE LETTERS OF
shadows upon that, with a tint of lines — a zvash by virtue of its
quiet parallelism : so each line of the shadowing would be a little
fainter than the preceding outlines.
Your suggestion of a " short paper " now and then rouses
another of my hobbies. If I love any secular thing better than art
it is literature. Would that even now I might serve a late appren
ticeship to it ! Surely the direction of a line or the gradation of a
colour are not more interesting than the structure of a paragraph.
Of the " dead masters in water-colour " I know less than of the
oil painters, being myself a water-worker by accident, and liking to
regard water-colour as it appears in tempera and, on a small scale,
in the old missals. With the exception of my letter in Blake's Lifey
my only scrap on art subjects has been my recollection of a few
facts in Flaxman's life, which bore chiefly on his moral symmetry,
and which, if not wanted by the friend to whom I gave it, would
be at your service. Believe me, Yours very truly, S. PALMER.

LXXV. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
[Furze Hill], October, 1871.
MY DEAR Mr. HAMERTON. I can quite sympathize with you
about etching uncertainties. My standing grief has been the un
accountable stopping of the biting, after two or three — sometimes
after one stopping-out ; and it may be useful to know that you are
subject to this with the Dutch mordant ; which, never having tried
it, I hoped was reliable, till the other day I learned the reverse
from one of our finest etchers.
Your thin ground difficulty obliges you to do what seems to me
the best thing possible, viz. to remove the ground after completing
the outlines and the organic markings. I should like an outline as
deeply bitten as those in the Liber Studiorum ; and believe that if
we were to make an etched copy of a bit of near landscape out of one
of Albert Diirer's wood-cuts, of the same width of line, and then,
on a new transparent ground, to add what we wished of shade, the
lines would scarcely be too powerful to support them. And the
purely liquid quality of all shadow, to which anything like richness
of texture is destruction, coming over the textured richness of the
lines would give that fulness of quality which in art, as in every-

SAMUEL PALMER.

3>7

thing else, can result only from the union of opposites. He is
great, says Pascal, who touches the poles with his grasp.
Let any one look at a fine impression of Albert Durcr's Holy
Family going through the wood, with the palm-tree on the left, and
think what a comfort it would be to have such a preparation
ready bitten on the copper, the ground removed, and a transparent
one laid on for beginning the shadows. But somehow or another,
I fancy we have all of us more or less the notion that because an
etching should be spirited it should be done in a hurry. I grant
that there is a sort of vigour and a ver)- agreeable texture got in
this way, which delights the eye for a short time, but beyond which
the work never grows upon us : but Rembrandt's, many of whose
etchings are, in the leading points, very highly finished, which he
was constantly revising, sometimes to the extent of organic changes,
retain their hold long after the first ocular pleasure is over.
I am no great believer in etching direct from nature ; or in
doing anything but through the medium of studies. Callcott told
me he thought that a picture done out of doors must needs be
false, because nature is changing every minute. But if a pen and
ink drawing is made out of doors, there is more left for selection,
and all that is most attractive can be faithfully transferred to the
copper ; very near objects [being] worked at the same hour of each
day. Grand tree-trunks and the like seem excellent subjects ; but
distances and mountains never know their own minds ten minutes
together, so we are obliged to have two drawings, one of the parts —
one of the chosen phenomenon seized at the moment.
The pen drawings I have seen by Titian and other great
Italians, when carried only to a certain point, ignore local colour,
and would be true sketches of scenery in plaster of Paris ; yet
these are the very men unrivalled in richness of local colour and
splendour of effect. And indeed, their power of figure-drawing
enabled them to extract so much form and modelling from land
scape nature, as to fill the eye with a certain richness and brilliancy,
before any masses of shade came in.
What would I not give to see etchings, or any landscape copper
work, by Sebastian Bourdon ?
You will see that I am not etching, by my running on so
glibly : may the humbling copper soon shut my mouth ! . . . .
Believe me, Ever truly yours, S. Palmer.

318 THE LETTERS OF
LXXVI. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, November, 1871.
My dear Mr. Valpy. . . . Knowing your feeling and per
ception of high art, I believe that what you gather in your own mind
from Mr. Haweis is perfectly true and wholesome, but I must say I
should guess him to prefer Shelley's Queen Mab to Paradise
Regained. With you, I believe it is the sort of yearning which all who-
really feel entertain towards reaches of unattainable beauty —
unattainable till the earth "and the works that are therein shall be
burned up." And in the new earth, all the powers which God has
given to man will be consummated.
It seems to me that the author proceeds upon assumptions
which are untrue, and that Music has not indeed her rival, but her
greater sister, I had almost said her Queen, in Verse ; that while
Music waits upon her and learns of her she goes right, but break
ing loose from her, plays the wanton in a -luxurious effeminacy
which a wise commonweal would forbid. Would Handel's Messiah
affect us as it does without the divine words ? Is not music, as a
medium of " emotion," excelled by eloquence ?
Of ancient music we know little or nothing ; not even its scale ;
but has any music we can name produced such powerful emotion
as even modern oratory ?
Was ever music 'played that affected the soul so deeply as the
highest poetry read — read even to ourself ?
Where is the music without words that can affect us like
Milton's allegory of Sin and Death ? For indeed, two of music's
three powers exist in perfection without musical notes, in such verse
as Virgil's or Milton's ; viz., melody and rhythm ; " harmonious
verse " being a false expression for melodious.
Few people love music more than I, revelling as I do even in
the peculiar tone of each individual instrument, independently of
melodious succession. It was from boyhood my favourite amuse
ment ; also how many hours have gone to the violin and to sing
ing ! But surely, any man in whom reason and the higher
imagination bear sway will be more deeply affected by a well-
acted tragedy than by the sweetest or most solemn combination
of sound — will have most " emotion " excited, which is the point in
question.

SAMUEL PALMER.

3">

I can only understand what Mr. Hawcis says about colouring
by supposing him ignorant of what has been achieved. If wc look
around us and behind us at the marvellous works of man in the
various arts ; at works and monuments modern and ancient, is
there any greater measure of attainment than Titian's as a
colourist; or of spiritual symbolism than in some of the more
Southerly Italians, and of Blake in his best and most highly-
finished drawings ? Did not the Venetians "constitute the colour
art"? Was not Titian peculiarly master of its phraseology?
" Instruments were invented " more complete than with all our
modern chemistry we possess.
I think perhaps the author has in his mind's eye something
wholly beyond the reach of mere colours, viz., real light. This,
added to the pigments in little bottles of sunbeams, would make
matters very different: Now, as Mr. Hamerton says in his paper
on Tain (I think that is the name), in the last number but one of
The Pall Mall Budget, it is impossible to paint a red autumnal
cherry-leaf with the sunlight on it.
What inspired young ladies think they may accomplish after a
course of lessons is what can barely be approached by life-long
study. If they have any real fancy they imagine light and colour
in equal force.
I fear you will think me ver)- controversial, but I will ask you
to read my assertions as queries, being sceptical on all subjects
but ONE, which is the object of faith. Faith, as St. Paul teaches
us, is the SUBSTANCE of things hoped for : sight is conversant
only with phenomena. Experimental science, though it may
distantly tend to it, can never be knowledge ; for if we know, what
need for experiment ?
With what grand modesty does Sir Isaac Newton speak of his
vast attainments ; in difficulties ready to suggest other than his
most favoured solutions. He compares himself, I think, to a child
gathering a few shells or pebbles by the margin of the ocean of
truth. But there is no hesitation, or qualification, or reserve in
his avowal of faith in the word of God. What a contrast to the
incredulity of flippant sciolists, who believe only in what they can
handle !
A female atheist, lecturing on the sea beach some time since,
said. " For my part, I make a point of believing nothing which

320 THE LETTERS OF
I can't see." " What do you say to the wind, Ma'am ? " said an
old sailor who stood by.
Why do I run on so ? Yours, S. PALMER.

LXXVII. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, November ii, 1871.
My dear Mr. VALPY. Until the last day or two I have been
very poorly ; part of the time, however, thinking the more perhaps,
through being able to work the less. There are moments of
lassitude which, removing our work to a distance, reveal its main
scope and general proportions, too apt to be lost sight of in
application to particulars.
I hope to send to the winter exhibition one of the studies you
mentioned, the waterfall in shadow, which I do not care to sell, as
it is so useful for reference : however, I have put 80 guineas on it.
With it goes also a little drawing of quite a different character.
I have been imagining you by your fireside, talking over your
autumnal forest walks. There is a vividness in present impressions
which memory lacks, but then it bolts everything from its bran,
and clothes the selected essence in a soft, harmonious unity very
congenial with a contemplative turn of mind. . . .
We trust that the deep sadness which overshadowed your path
has yielded to those consolations of which you so well know the
value ; and that many happy years are before you, subject only to
those wholesome fluctuations which are needful to remind us that
" this is not our rest ; " though it may, in God's good providence,
afford us many resting places in our upward journey. Believe me,
&c, S. Palmer.

LXXVIII. To Mr. John Richmond.
Red Hill, November, 1871.
My dear John. I thought that the pleasant duty was unex-
ceptionably discharged : no insult, no savageness, no blood drawn ;
and Mr. C. is a model of the breeding which the English prize so
highly, being quite undemonstrative and incapable of warming
with his subject.

SAMUEL PALMER. 321
Perhaps, for a moderate honorarium, he might be prevailed
upon to attend private families occasionally, to their manifest
advantage. The cat, like the steam hammer, has a wide scope of gradation
between feathering and flaying, and if each member of a household
kept respectively a little private account of peccadilloes, one
attendance would suffice for several of them, which would be
economical. Two lashes, we will say, for any words of detraction
or slander ; three for novel-reading by daylight, or after 1 1 p.m. ;
five good ones for abbreviating the preterites in reading the Scrip
tures or Liturgy.
I like impartial justice for rich and poor, and think it quite
unfair to the middle and upper classes to deprive them of Mr.
Calcraft's services, which seem to be comparatively wasted on poor
creatures who have never been taught, or taught nothing but
evil from their cradles. No, let him flourish the scourge over
sinners against light — over highly educated sophists who hunt for
souls. Suppose now, for a moment, that the heads of a great university
obliged the students to "get up" for their "moral philosophy"
course (facetiously so called) certain books which tend to confuse all
distinction between right and wrong (the most deadly cruelty which
can be perpetrated on the young), might not the hearts of these
" Heads " be made better for a little counter-irritation between the
shoulders ? Shall we say thirty lashes with the " Pentonville "
cord, which is a little thicker ?
It is a distinguishing mark of God's children that they hate sin,
and live in a constant, holy fear of falling into it ; and you will find
it equally characteristic of those who, in a plain spoken OLD
BOOK, are called the children of the Devil, that these latter
have become seared against any sensitiveness to sin, as such, and
try with miserable sophistry to explain away its guilt — nay, to
deny its very nature and essence, calling it the accidental result of
imperfect faculties, of cerebral structure, of a neglected education,
or such like. Now if, by bad example, I lead a young man into
sin, my guilt will be great indeed, yet neither of us are out of the
pale of repentance. But what if I enjoin him carefully to pore
over works of elaborate argument tending to ignore the sovereignty
of conscience, to make it appear that pleasure is, after all, the real
Y

322 THE LETTERS OF
motive of our actions, or that expediency must over-rule principle
— that the just and right is not obedience to the Divine Law, but
what we think will be on the whole best for the greatest number of
people ? If I were to do this I should not be defiling the streams
of action but poisoning the fountain. It would be " robbery with
violence " ; an irreparable outrage and mutilation of conscience. I
hope I am wrong, and that no such books are propounded at
such an university ; otherwise the professors of Laputa were
more hopefully employed in trying to extract " sunbeams from
cucumbers." From silence to the contrary, it gives me much pleasure to infer
that you are all well.
Outis 1 has been half-way to jaundice, Dr. Holman tells him ; to
which imputing his moroseness, you may perhaps allow him to
subscribe himself, yours affectionately, though he is such a
croaker. 1872
LXXIX. To P. G. Hamerton. Furze Hill, January 26, 1872.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. Had I thanked you earlier for your
[Etcher's] Handbook, which came long ago, I could not have thanked
you so much ; for it is the test of good books as of good pictures that
•they improve with acquaintance. I had a little Milton bound with
brass corners that I might carry it always in my waistcoat-pocket :
after doing so for twenty years it was all the fresher for the
porterage. Your invention of the positive process is equally useful and ele
gant : useful because the reverse method lessens the pleasure of
work ; elegant, because the materials are delicate, and the process
cleanly and expeditious.
On the whole, there are only two points in the book against which
I am inclined to except. You call the copper acid " nitric," which
I think ought to be nitrous,2 nitric being the mordant of steel.
Secondly, if Mr. Fagin may step into the witness-box to speak to
[ l A name my father assumed. — Ed.]
[ 2 In reply, Mr. Hamerton explained that the French use nitric for both steel and
copper, weakening it for steel. —Ed.]

In Clovelly Park.

SAMUEL PALMER.

323

character, I would suggest that the prisoners at the bar, however
much they have erred, have not been guilty of clipping— that they
have attempted rather to bow the guitar than to pizzicato the violin.
I don't defend either, and, with some fear of merited chastisement,
beg your acceptance of the accompanying guitar performance con
arco. Impromptu graces were out of the question, as it was begun
years ago to illustrate a classical subject ;' but finding that I could
no-how clip my poodle into lion-shape, I even let the hair grow, and
christened him for the Art Union, The Morning of Life. I must
try to be a better boy next time.
Most likely you are full of engagements when in town, yet I
sometimes hope that you will spend a day here in spring-time. If
you would like to do so as an act of penance, I would annoy you
with inquiries as to the best wa)- of disposing of a completed verse
translation of Virgil's Eclogues which, right or wrong, I am resolved
(all being well) to print. Whether they would be eligible one by
one for any periodical I don't know, or whether there would be an
opening for the disposal of the copyright.
It seems desirable that those who do not read them in the
original should have some version from which the pastoral essence
has not quite evaporated.
Whatever my version may be, it is a work done con amore in
the superlative degree ; but so is murder by a zealous " Thug."
It has been " bread eaten in secret," as no one but my son knows
of it. If Blake were alive and I could afford it, I would ask him to
make a head-piece to each bucolic.
How exquisitely he would have done it we know, seeing that
perhaps the most intense gems of bucolic sentiment in the whole
range of art are his little wood-cut illustrations to Phillips' Pastorals
in Dr. Thornton's book. They seem to me utterly unique. But
enough and more than enough of myself and my dreamings.
Etching out of doors finds, I think, its most eligible subjects in
what you have chosen — tree trunks. They are indeed very con
genial to the resources of art, which some things equally or more
attractive seem not to be. I do not see why a month should not
be spent upon a grand group of stems, working each day while the
light falls at the same angle. How prominent they are
[] Hercules and Cacus. Hercules was altered into the kneeling woman. —El).]
Y 2

324 THE LETTERS OF
(were alas !) in the Peter Martyr and other works of the great
historical landscape-painters.
If they or anything else can be " done at a sitting," so much the
better, because life is short ; but Macbeth's famous receipt for cooking
beef-steaks demands emphasis on the " were."
What you have done at a sitting to illustrate the biting process
is, I think, quite satisfactory for the purpose, though the advantage
of farther work is evidenced by the other examples, in some of
which you have taken several. Believe me, Very truly yours,
S. Palmer.

LXXX. To Mr. F. G. Stephens.
Furze Hill, May 4, 1872.
Dear Mr. Stephens. We deeply sympathize with you. How
should we do otherwise, having more than once drained a like cup of
bitterness ? What can I say, what can I think of to comfort you ?
It is distressing to stand by and witness such a sorrow, with no
power to alleviate it, and it seems a mockery to fill the page with
stale topics of condolence.
One of the stalest, however, is so precious that it can never be
worn out : I mean the precious hope which both nature and
Revelation have written indelibly within our hearts-*-the hope of
rejoining our beloved ones when the hideous discrepancies which
sin has brought into the world shall be done away for ever.
Mrs. Stephens' loss has been precisely my own ; a beautiful young
life full of purpose and promise plucked up by the roots. To this
day I cannot bear to dwell upon mine ; but the Divine Comforter
can sometimes apply well-known words with new and strange power
to the wounded heart. It was only last year, I think, that walking
down to the Red Hill station on my way to town in the deepest
dejection of mourning for my poor boy I was confronted, on enter
ing the waiting-room, with these words on one of the large-print
Scripture placards. '" . . . He will dwell with them, and they shall
be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God;
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and there shall
be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be
any more pain, for the former things are passed away. And He
that sat upon the throne said, Behold I make all things new. And

SAMUEL PALMER. 325
He said unto me, Write ; for these words arc true and faithful."
Revelation xxi.
Well ! I did not sorrow any more that day. This was the solu
tion of all the moral and physical discrepancies around us indi
cated by those discrepancies themselves, if rightly understood. This
" making of all things new" [is] a necessity, if we may so speak, of
Divine Love, after the wreck and debris of a great moral catastrophe
have strewed the face of a once beautiful earth — types of a worse
confusion in the hearts of men. The very axis of the earth
[seems] somewhat to have changed in its relative position to the
sun, making vast tracts inclement which once were genial, if we
may credit the explorations of so young a science as geology ;
which, however, must not be taken on trust for a century to come,
as all new sciences go through some ages of self-contradiction
before they can right themselves.
I was a free-thinker at fourteen, and spent much time in contro
versial reading which ought to have been given to painting. It
would be affectation in me to deny that I am acquainted with the
whole scope of popular sceptical reasoning ; and can therefore, after
my poor little storm-beaten s kiff has shifted about among quick
sands and treacherous, floating isles, green to the eye but fatal to
the feet — after all this I can the more assuredly find an
anchorage, where Pascal, Bacon, Newton, and Milton lowered their
cables. From this spiritual harbour of refuge we may look forth
on the material element without terror; albeit perhaps, with the
deepest grief. Your dear treasure is there ; mine is mouldering in
earth which I can almost see from this window : but the precious
words return upon us like the refrain of some heavenly music.
" There shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying — Behold
I make all things new."
Through untimely illness, caused, my doctor says, by the late
trying changes of temperature, my year's work came to nought ;
or rather, stood over ; and I must now, all being well, go away for
a week or two for change of air. On my return I do hope that
you will bring Mrs. Stephens and dear Holly down for a long day ;
if by that time you have sufficiently recovered from this dreadful
shock ; for you will come to see fellow- mourners, who will not
" sing songs to a heavy heart." ....
In the presence of such a sorrow as yours, I should not have

326 THE LETTERS OF
dared to name anything so utterly futile in comparison as etchings,
or the like ; but as you have done so, I must very kindly thank you
for the trouble you have taken in transmitting mine to the
Museum, and with our united sincere and anything but formal
condolences, subscribe myself, Gratefully yours, S. Palmer.

LXXXI. To A. H. Palmer.
Margate, June, 1872.
My dear Herbert. Independently of their divine pathos,
the 13th to the 16th verses of Sunday morning's second lesson 1
seem to me, in our version, to be a flawless gem of narrative
English. From this brief, barn-door-fowl flight I drop at once to
lower but not base matters. In one of Sir Joshua Reynolds's
Discourses he quotes with all reverence, or alludes to, the 15th
verse, as not less truly indicating the conditions of all high excel
lence in art. The higher the aim, the more child-like must be the
disposition of the aspirant. Sir Isaac Newton compares himself
to a little child collecting a few pebbles or shells by the margin of
the ocean of Truth.
Poetic art, expressing itself by verse, by marble, or by picture
is one of man's loftiest pursuits. He will do well in such to resume
his pinafores. The means also are arduous : structural knowledge
of the figure, and an all-embracing study of the Antique. Pinafores
still ! As he descends to practical geometry and perspective he
may change his pinafore for a paper cap and working apron, and
tuck up his sleeves, to get through them as soon as he can, con
sistently with thoroughness  Art is so long and life so
short that I could wish you were well rid of this " geometry," as
they call it ; and as it is too bulky to batter, you had better descend
to the mining, pickaxe in hand, and work out so much as you
comfortably can per diem, but not over work. Labour such as this,
which, unlike the higher things, can be accurately measured, can
be accurately apportioned. This " geometry " reminds me of the
sudden check presented when you are taking a field walk in Corn
wall by one of those high stone-wall hedgerows. There is nothing
for it but to get over. . . . Your affectionate father, S. PALMER.
[ > Probably Mark x.— Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 327
LXXXII. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
Furze Hill, August, 1S72.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. ... I wonder that the French, the
countrymen of the world's greatest landscape-painter, the country
men of such a triumvirate as Claude, N. Poussin, Sebastian
Bourdon, should rejoice, as they seem to do, in blue mounts and
blue whites.
We English are just as bad. A philosopher to whom I am
indebted for some rudiments of civilization stood still suddenly
one day while we were walking and talking and uttered these
words, " Light is orange." They have never been forgotten.
All being well, I go to Town at the end of this week to get a
little brain embrocation from some old pictures, but principally to
see Mr. Cayley, whom I know well, about these pending auto-
typics. If I could but get the TIME, I would give Mr. Seeley
another chance for T/ie Portfolio by making and lending him a
pen and India-inkite done exactly as I am doing the Virgils ; but
somehow or other, let a design be never so studiously simple in
the masses it will fill itself as it goes on, like the weasel in the
fable who got into the meal-tub ; and when the pleasure begins,
in attempting tone, and mystery, and intricacy, away go the hours
at a gallop. They seem to take fright, like the nervous animal
you were leading. Well says the Volume which contains all
truth and the germs of all wisdom and knowledge, " An horse is
a vain thing for safety." At the risk of imputed consanguinity,
I confess a preference for the donkey, which, in old times, was
specially used by persons of dignity ; and the Persian ass is, I
think, abstractedly from associations of strength and speed, more
beautiful than the horse. " Speak, ye that ride on white asses,"
we find in that grand lyric of Deborah and Barak. A horse is
never to be relied upon, and no horsemanship is an assurance of
safety : think of Sir Robert Peel ! Under the present dispensation
the horse is a necessity and a great gift to man ; but war is a
necessity, it would appear, and yet I never wish those for whom I
have a deep regard to have much converse with either.
After this explosion of monomania you will agree with me that
it is time to wind up ; so with very hearty congratulations on your
escape  believe me, dear Mr. Hamerton, with many thanks
for the interest you take in my doings, Yours very truly,
S. Palmer.

328 THE LETTERS OF
LXXXIII. To Mr. C. W. Cope.
September, I forget what, 1872.
My DEAR COPE. Many thanks for Mr. Galloway's most
interesting book just returned. To pass judgment upon it is for
those who have read Newton's Principia, &c, &c, &c, &c, &c,
&c, &c, &c, &c, &c, &c. ; but " a cat may look at a king," and
my feline eyesight can see in the dark that the inclination of the
moon's orbit is remarkable.
In utter ignorance I " guess " that the supposed nucleus of the
earth, surrounded with fluid, would very soon adjust itself to the
new equator of the outer crust : there is such an entirety in the
direction of bodies in rapid movement.
Of course I can't guess whether the earth moves round the sun
or vice versa. The greatest mathematicians in various ages have
been divided about it, and it amounts tq the same thing in calcula
tions. Like everything else it has gone see-saw, which those who
are at the upper end of the plank for a moment call " progress " ;
whereas the whole history of nations, and science, and art has been
see-saw (ill spelt I fear) or, if we must have a fine word, '' undula
tion." Is it not evident that any " advance " beyond the tombs of
the Medici must be sheer bombast ? Was it not the FACT ?
Newton, by the bye, was a less staunch Newtonian than his
followers : see his doubt about vacuum. He did not sing the hymn
which has this remarkable couplet,
" My Buts and Ifs I've laid aside,
And now in Shalls and Wills confide. ''
Nor another, of more rhetorical peculiarity, enriched with this
gem,
" Without an If to foul the stream,
Or Peradventure here."
What a treat for geologists, Mr. Galloway's cannon embedded
in solid rock ! — with Lyell for its purveyor !
But physics and morals will never be reconciled till they are
seen to be the opposite, not contrary poles of a vast whole ; and he
alone is most truly great, says Pascal, who can touch each pole
with either hand. Pigmy-like I cling to the moral pole, and believe
that any youth who can stand an examination in Sandford and
Merton is more fit for civil appointments than a crammed
sciolist. . . . Yours ever, S. PALMER.

SAMUEL PALMER. 329
LXXXIV. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
"Dii-i-ini-Ncr. Vii.ia," October, 1S72.
MY DEAR HOWARD. Like "Giant Despair" I have my fits
occasionally, and then a little truth comes out. Perhaps, however,
with characteristic timidity, I have been too mealy-mouthed. Hear
therefore your own Professor in the preface to his Lectures on
Sculpture. " Notably, within the last hundred years, all religion has perished
" from the practically active national minds of F ranee and England.
" No statesman in the Senate of either country would dare to use a
" sentence out of their acceptedly divine revelation, as having now
" a literal authority over them for their guidance, or even a sug-
" gestive wisdom for their contemplation.
" England especially has east her Bible full in the face of her
"former God ; and proclaimed with open challenge to Him, her
" resolved worship of His declared enemy Mammon."
Here is the sound of the trumpet ! If, after this, I repeat that
to dress in high merinos while the sun is up, and in low muslin
when he sets is a compound of decivilization and cruelty worthy
of the Feejees vvho eat their aunts, you will see at once that Apollo
has twitched my ear, and that, leaving higher matters to Mr. Ruskin,
mine has been a playful descant on the pastoral flute. Yours
affectionately, Outis.
LXXXV. To Mr. Richmond Seeley.
Furze Hill House, November 2, 1872.
My DEAR Sir. Many thanks for the two copies of The Portfolio
containing such excellent impressions of my etching on such
picturesque paper. I sit down to thank you before reading what
has been said about me because it is so very difficult to advert
properly to anything concerning No. 1 .
I am sure everything will be well written, and kindly written ;
and if corrected in the same spirit I shall be ready to kiss the rod,
for it struck me only the other morning that the most calamitous
of our birthdays was that on which we had become too old for
whipping. There is no hurry, but please send me that identical impression
from which the mechanical process autotype was done. I shall
then be able to reason accurately, and, I hope, to circumvent the

330 THE LETTERS OF
said mechanical into a virtual production of ten etchings, much
more truly etchings in public opinion than anything done on steel
or copper ; as the British Lion is unalterably persuaded that pen
and ink drawings are etchings, and that all etchings are drawings
in pen and ink I want, if I can, to make them so attractive that
people will say " Hang Corydon, and Thyrsis, and Venus, and Ceres
and all those ' fellows,'1 but here are no less than ten of the man's
etchings, and they are worth the money."
Not to give unnecessary trouble, I have tried to condense my
sine qua nons (shade of Cicero pardon the plural ! ) into a brace —
istly, the printing upon a luminous paper, without a tinge of
grey, blue, or green. 2ndly, entire disuse of lamp-black, and the
substitution of ivory black as printing-ink.
Lemma, or rather a'zlemma as I have found it made by human
perverseness. If we should think it desirable to mix a little brown
with the ivory black, that the brown should not be umber, but
Vandyke brown.2
From time to time, at your leisure, you might get light, perhaps,
as to the probability of these two very little matters to the doers,
but everything to me, being realized. As, however, every true
Englishman is a compound of rectitude and rut, I scarcely
expect it.
Stir a workman in his rut and he feels in a moment that
Magna Charta, trial by jury, blood-bought liberties, &c, &c, are
in jeopardy. Yours truly, S. PALMER.
You will find the brace of " nons " most useful in printing what
we call etchings.

LXXXVI. To Mr. Richmond Seeley.
November 6, 1872.
My dear Sir. Some little children were trying their eyes at a
puppet-show when one of them asked, " Please sir is that old
Boney, or the Queen of Sheba ? " " You pays your money, and you
takes your choice," said the benevolent showman. If I were you
I should not trouble myself about the etching [In The Portfolio] :
1 This is fact and quotation.
2 [When a copper-plate press was afterwards introduced at Furze Hill, I tried the
substitution of Vandyke brown for umber. We" found, however, that so much more
brown had to be added to the black in order to produce the desired tint, that the quality
of the ink was materially affected. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 331
probably it is as like sunrise as sunset, more shame for me: nay,
who knows but that some " British Lion " is at this moment pointing
out to Mrs. Leo and her purring progeny how subtly the artist has
discriminated between the two, so that no one could possibly
mistake it for a sunset ?
A painter must use his very utmost energy to move the public,
but he never can quite forsee the direction of the movement : the
best full moon I ever did sometimes passed for a sun ; but had I not
taken my utmost pains, it would have passed for neither, to anyone's
satisfaction. All the drawings arc in progress in various states of advance
ment ; none yet finished, and though I ardently wish they were
complete, I dare not hurry one of them. It will be some time yet
ere one of them is fully ripe. Directly one of them is so I will
send it you.
Supposing that there should be a lucid interval in this vile grey
and blue paper system, and that the mechanical process authorities
shall have some really white or creamy paper on which they could
print, I should think it would be well, if the first subject came well
upon it, to have enough for an edition secured at once, but this you
will consider. My case is rather hard : I want nothing done — only
some pernicious adjunct omitted. I have this moment placed one
of the mechanical process impressions beside a piece of London
board (Newman's), and it is evident to me that something has been
done either to blue or bleach the paper. If we asked the paper-
maker to make us a creamy tone we should rue the day. All I say
is, after you have washed them, make up the rags pure and simple
or impure and simple, into paper, just as they are, and let them
alone : no bleaching-acid, please, no blue-bag, no toning ....
Yours very truly, S. PALMER.
The very nice paper upon which you have printed these last
reminds me of Etching and Etchers, but with this difference, that
something has been done to cure (! ! !) the natural colour of the
rag, and that has chilled it. The maker of that lovely paper of
Mr. Hamerton's went to sleep and forgot the bleaching 
My demurs as to paper-making are a trifle. I was tpld at Mr.
Colnaghi's that a chemical agent was used in making the paper
for a large and expensive engraving, which, after a good while,
absolutely turned it BLACK.

332 THE LETTERS OF

LXXXVII. To Mr. F. G. Stephens.
Furze Hill, November 6, 1872.
Dear Mr. Stephens. When a judge "sums up" as favour
ably as you have done in The Portfolio the first impulse of the
gentleman in the " dock " is to thank him very heartily: yet, perhaps.
he is hardly in the right, for it half implies that the judge has been
warped by feelings of personal kindness : but he may justly be
grateful for the skilled elaboration with which every particle of
evidence in his favour has been noted. Nov/ your notes of my
works are so vivid that I could paint a picture from any one of
them without reference to studies and sketches, although much of
what you remember I have half forgotten.
It would be a yet additional kindness if you would get one
date altered in future copies of The Portfolio. I am quite
positively certain that my first exhibited work was in 18 18, or
1819. If catalogues say otherwise, there must have been another
S. Palmer. The first R.A. exhibition I ever saw was in 18 19.
In 1809 I had not long emerged from long clothes, and the
constellation of the Fork had not yet loomed in the horizon.
What promotion in after life equals breeching ? There were then
no knickerbockery gradations, but we emerged at a bound from
short petticoats and blue legs into blue trousers and sugar-loaf
buttons — and — O rapture ! into pockets ; a bi-sided potentiality
for gingerbread-nuts, story-books, toffy, squirts, and pop-guns.
How different the obverse of the medal ; yet, under happy
auspices, not less desirable when
" The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd,
Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made."
Maugre the elements, we have not yet given up the hope of
your promised visit, when something presents itself more cheery
than these leafless trees beaten half down by the rain.
I suppose, by this time, you are numbered among the favoured
few who have seen Mr. Holman Hunt's picture. I have a longing
desire to see it, but shall not reach town till the spring, if spared
to do so.
Fearful as the floods have been in many places, I trust you
have not been contemplating the reflection of that enchanting
Michael Angelo bas-relief, in the extended Thames.

SAMUEL PALMER.

Hi

Pray give my best regards to Mrs. Stephens and love to the
Golden Holly, and excuse the haste of this scrawl, as I am obliged
to seize the moment as it flies. Ever, dear Mr. Stephens, Yours
faithfully, S. Palmer.
P.S. I think there must have been another Palmer, as I never
exhibited a portrait.
LXX^VIII. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
' Furze Hill, November, 1872.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. Just as you have been saying in The
Portfolio certain kind and touching words about me which tended to
moisten the eyelids, I find that you are taking no compassion upon
yourself. We have read of those who, while guiding some rapid
machinery, have been caught by a part of their dress, dragged in,
and cut in pieces. These importunate engagements are just the
superfluous dress which I beseech you to tear off at once. A wife is
self-knowledge ; unpleasantly so sometimes, when lifting up the
forefinger of admonition against our little foibles ; sometimes still
more unpleasantly, but most savingly. I ask you, as a personal
favour to myself, to read this poor, homely, but hearty protest to
Mrs. Hamerton against what is nothing less than self-destruction,
and to consult with her about some steps to be immediately taken
for securing you one twelve-month of rest. I don't mean idleness,
but one great, broad, unexecutionized, Bonasoni mass of shade,
concerning which, if I have said anything worth quoting, make what
use you like of it, or anything I may write, provided always
the matter quoted contains no names of living men, women, or <
children, and no libel upon the dead : begging as a favour that you
will supply defective punctuation, and see that the relatives and
antecedents agree in number.
Bonasoni seems to me the greatest master of shadowing upon
copper. " Well, but it is like baby's work : there is no execution."
— That is it : that is precisely what I mean. " But there is no
richness of texture." I have yet to learn that, unless after flagella
tion, the human skin is much granulated. Let any one who can
draw, copy exactly in pen and ink some boldly-shadowed limb of
Bonasoni's, and afterwards turn it into a tree-trunk by vigorous
line work expressing the textures of the bark, and he will then see
texture in its proper function, and shadow in its poetic sleep.

334 THE LETTERS OF
Claude, the supreme tree master (his mother must have been a
Dryad !) never transgresses the neutrality of shade, though, from the
intricacy of his matter, the science is less obvious than in Bonasoni.
Textureless shadows, composed of parallel lines in gentle un
affected curve, will be found, I think, in Titian's landscape
sketches, and in the drawings and etchings of all landscape-
painters who have founded themselves upon the human figure ;
textural shadows in those who, without such discipline, have
struggled after the picturesque ; and, as a meretricious accomplish
ment, in almost all the line engravers since the time of Woollett.
This, if you think fit, may be spliced on to the passage you
wish to quote. I think it clearly expresses what I mean — that (for
a wonder) it is perspicuous. My writing on such subjects is usually
so much the reverse in the first draft, that nothing short of the
shock your letter has given me would have waked me up to it. A
lady told me that her husband's work (literary) had been brighter
and more forcible ever since a pitch from his phaeton which nearly
fractured his skull.
Now I am going to be saucy. Mere amateur as I am
in literature, and scarcely that, one of the charms of your prose
has seemed to me to be this, that if you walked you walked,
and ,if you ran you ran ; but that you were never to be detected in
a hurried gait. Can you retain this leisured manliness, this noble
rhythm, if you suffer the publishers to lure you to over-production ?
I hope you will consider this very rude at the first reading, and
what I have said above, very rude, and that you will be very angry,
and that, like the fat boy in Pickwick, I shall succeed in making
" your flesh creep " — anything to create a sensation ; to stir you
up ; that with a fresh eye you may turn round upon your over
work, and take some calm but determined step while it is yet
not too late. The break down of health comes suddenly —
irremediably. . . . Yours most truly. S. PALMER.
LXXXIX. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
/ Furze Hill, November 9, 1872.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. I have just sent off my letter of
November 7, but this discomfiture of your Autun project haunts
me. There's not exactly beauty or picturesqueness in the usual

SAMUEL PALMER. 335
sense of the word, but there is a something or other about an old
French town which nothing comes up to : and with strenuous old
Rome "cropping up" here and there, Autun must be to our
tastes as satisfying as a huge plum cake to a schoolboy's. . . . This
piece of paper may as well lie ready in my writing-case in case
anything suggests itself; just jotting down each " notion" between
lines, without inflicting upon you any more of my long-winded
commentaries — remaining, Yours most truly, S. Palmer. . . .

I am trying the crow-quill for evanescent passages : it is yield
ing and tender, and apt for dreamy delicacies : it belongs, of
course, not to the great organ, or choir organ, but to the swell.
1 regretted sending my last letter when it was too late, fearing
that the rod had been deserved for busybodying in other men's
matters, but am cheered by finding in your answer just received
abundant tokens of forgiveness. A suggestion or two, offered
with THE UTMOST DIFFIDENCE, I shall write down in the
shape of positive assertion, merely as the shortest way.
Oil-painting seems wholly incompatible with the vocation of an
author, as it is a lifelong study in itself. Reynolds insisted that it
must be studied as a lost art of which we find that each of the most
successful artists manages to recover a fragment sufficient for his
immediate need. By marvellous perseverance, much agony, and
many prayers, Etty accomplished this. Sham oil-painting N
(relatively sham to Titian) works with slow-drying oil pastes
of many colours, and, if employed upon subjects not much
above the perceptive powers of the buying class and very
dexterously executed, may " lead on to fortune." The artist
feels that he has given the Old Masters the "go-by," and
partakes the innocent rapture of Jervas, who cried out, having
put the last touches to a copy from Titian, " POOR LITTLE
TIT: HOW HE WOULD STARE 1" But this dexterity
again demands the whole time, and seems wholly incompatible with
authorship. The same holds good of the exquisite materials
tempera and egg. From my old practice in tempera I TRY, as
much as in me lies, to make my drawings tempera pictures.
I think that every sort of practice that a man has had ought to
tell somewhat upon everything he does in whatever material. The
Old Masters came to oil-painting through fresco and tempera.

!
5

336 THE LETTERS OF
Water-colours upon paper hued like the lightest whity-brown
paper (I have a sketch-book of whity-brown paper which Mr.
Newman got hot-pressed for me : it is very thin however) and
with use of white, are most useful for registering passing effects,
and soft [coloured] crayons still more so (the Fixateur Rouget, sold
somewhere in Paris, quite fixes them ; even the soft Swiss, which
are the best) : and they are most valuable, I think, to the etcher, by
enabling him to desist in a moment from his detailed work, when
the right effect presents itself, or the right figures or cattle are
passing, and to register those transitory but all-important suggest
ions in a moment. And in etching at home I don't think a line
should be scratched before, at the cost of whatever study, a little
sketch is made, showing the general effect (I care not how smudgy),
in which the masses and trains of dark are right, and the emphatic
lights and darks in their proper places. And this, whether the
etching is meant to be worked into tone, or suggested almost by line.
All the kinds of art we are busy with depend, I think, for their
hold upen the eye, upon the right construction of lights and
shadows. I know the vast importance of the above, from having
often and shamefully neglected it. Reynolds's BLOT practice
from the Flanders and Holland pictures seems to me invaluable.
The little effect sketch for the proposed etching may be done best
with charcoal, I think, fixing as you get certainties, for you may fix
and refix with the Fixateur as often as you like.
The only quite certain way of making money by water-colours
is, I fancy, to do such figures, fruit, and flowers as William Hunt
did, and to do them as well. This again wants a whole life.
ETCHING seems to me to stand quite alone among the com
plete arts in its compatibility with authorship. You are spared
the dreadful death-grapple with colour which makes every earnest
artist's liver a pathological curiosity. Take, for instance, only a
unit of the milliard — the painting of but one bit of human flesh
under one given influence of light and atmosphere. Well I re
member Mulready's saying to me, " To get one quality of flesh is
comparatively easy ; to get two is difficult ; to unite three is very
difficult." Etching does not necessarily demand more than individual or
local chiaroscuro, and the crayon will seize brilliant phenomena.

.V A M UE L P A I. ME R.

.5 37

But the great peculiarity of etching seems to be that its diffi
culties are not such as excite the mind to " restless ecstasy," but are
an elegant mixture of the manual, chemical and calculative, so that
its very mishaps and blunders (usually remediable) are a constant
amusement. The tickling sometimes amounts to torture, but, on
the whole, it raises and keeps alive a speculative curiosity — it has
something of the excitement of gambling, without its guilt and its
ruin. For these and other reasons I am inclined to think it the
best comptu exponent of the artist-author's thoughts.
(Quite abruptly, as it occurs to me, I would suggest that it is
sometimes best, when you have much near matter, not to etch
delicate sky or distance at first, but to put them in after two or
three bitings : you then are in no terror, and can overbite and get
a good rattling first proof. My best first proofs were those which
quite frightened me ; and I foolish!)- began softening, instead of
laying a ground for intense, dark lines like those in the Liber
Studiorum, which would soon have brought the first biting to reason.
If you work from an organized effect in your little sketch, you don't
want so much to see your effect on the copper.)

Now I'm going ultra crepidam into the impudent vein again,
telling you what I should do in a matter I know nothing about.
Were it my blessed privilege to be an author (for, after all, what
comes up to a good book ?), and an author of your calibre, I should
try to make that my Fortunatus's purse. The Reviews, such as
TJie Edinburgh and Quarterly, are lucrative, and contributions to
first-rate periodical literature would buy tlie time for the slower
elaboration of such standard works as were intended for " Prince
Posterity." Who knows, however, but that The Portfolio may span
the globe — that its etchings may sparkle in Australia ? The great
thing to bear in mind, as you have done, is that the many are
sluggish ; that indifference is your enemy — to give the British Lion
a series of gentle electric shocks. Perhaps it will become the
accredited etching organ. Some of our very best English etchers
have not yet appeared in it. Where are the great capitalists who
prefer giving three thousand pounds for a single picture to giving
three hundred ? Here we are, with our coppers and acids all ready.
The price of one picture would set thirty coppers going at £100
each ; or, much better for the Etching art, fifteen at £200. Why

338 THE LETTERS OF
should original steel or copper work be so miserably underpaid
compared with engraver's copies on those metals ? A moderate
capitalist might get some picking out of us if he had the wit.
Going his rounds he might say to himself, " There's a promising
young man at Red Hill, with remarkably light hair : I'll invest in
him." O ! the joy — colours and brushes pitched out of the window;
plates the Liber Studiorum size got out of the dear, little etching-
cupboard where they have long reposed ; great needles sharpened
three-corner-wise like bayonets ; opodeldoc rubbed into the fore
head to wake the brain up ; and a Great Gorge of old poetry to
get up the dreaming ; for, after all, that's " the seasoning as does it."
Not while he was tarring his sheep, or counting his woolsacks, but
while Endymion slept on Latmos, did Cynthia pause.
In answer to your commercial question I will hazard something
which has occurred to me ; premising that, in private negotiation,
drawings are better sold in the summer than just now, when the
dealers may guess that we are expecting our annual bouquet of
those little sweet Williams which " come in " at Christmas ; the
rule, adjusted by the nicest " sliding scale," being to offer less in
exact proportion in which more would be acceptable — " political
economy " in short ; the Golden Rule of Greed, Give to the
Rich ; grind the Poor. And what with modern habits, the waste
of modern servants, and the decreased and decreasing value
of money, who is not poor under two thousand a year ? What
occurs to me is the transmutation into cash of the most improving
possible practice ; the seizing of transient effects by the best — the
only perfect way, soft [coloured] crayons and charcoal ; which I think
should always be in the artist's pocket. Suppose you had made a
first sketch of one of your Autun subjects thus, upon ^th imperial
or less, snatching the best effect, and chose to copy that the same
size, .... [fixing] it between each sitting ; you might take it to
the spot, and finish the depths with water-colours, using the colour
rather dry if the paper were absorbent (you may load on the crayon),
using crayon-paper of a cream-colour or a light buff tint. I should
think such drawings would go down delightfully at the Dudley
Gallery. Charcoal — the very (average) colour of near, cast
shadows, used for a fine tree, finished as if you did not intend to
colour it, would be an excellent preparation to colour over with

SAMUEL PALMER. 339
transparent and semi-transparent tints ; and then being able to
fix charcoal or crayon between each sitting keeps all progressive.
Still, as this would be an experiment, I should not advise spending
much time upon it. I would trust no crayons (but the Swiss)
which I did not make myself, as they mix lead (flake white)
with the crayon white and light tints. I have a study done with
 's crayons in which the high lights on a cloud and the flash
of lightning are the emphatic darks. I usually try to catch
transient effects and passing figures with pencil, writing the colours
and various remarks on the several parts ; but, as a sketching cam
paigner, I think soft crayons and charcoal are the sheet anchor.
Turner was said to have made ten thousand studies of skies alone.
So now, unawares, I have come round in this precious piece of cir
cular advice to what is clearly incompatible with the demands of
authorship. In fact, though at the risk of wearying you I have
tried to touch upon the points you mention, I don't think myself a
good adviser as to affairs. I am looking into my mind at this
moment, and can only find one bit of wisdom there — I mean the
advice I constantly give myself, and usually follow, " Whatever
things you have to do, always do the most disagreeable first." If
that were my own invention I should be a little conceited : it was
stolen somewhere no doubt.
Your own plan of study seems to me quite beautiful. And
what a blessing to throw it off when you are tired, and to become
paterfamilias in a moment. What so charming as to be with little
children, whose simplicity, and faith, and love are models of our
own highest possible attainment ?
One hint only I will venture. Intense study is not, I think,
properly balanced by violent exercise either on horseback or on
foot. Those who are constantly grappling with brain efforts,
should in physical discipline lean, as Lord Bacon says, to the
benign extreme. I don't think that either author or artist could
bear the discipline of a boxer in training. " Boxer," by alliterative,
reminds me of biscuit. Woe to the man who dines late, and who
does not take some little luncheon about twelve o'clock ; the neglect
of this has '' slain its thousands."
One word about the Virgils, as you so kindly advert to them.
When you " commanded " me to make illustrations I loathed the
z 2

340 7 HE LETTERS OF
thought. But I took " the disagreeable first," and now it is m
all-engrossing study. They take a long time for the very reaso
that I am longing to see them done, and know that the shortes
and only way is to aim at no mechanical finish and to put onl;
touches of love. . . .
Pray do not answer this long rigmarole. Would that I couli
write more incisively and to the purpose : At the end of a lonj
letter these words usually occur to me, " A prating fool shall fall.
But with many thanks for your indulgent interest in my Hobby—
a double Hobby now, believe me, Yours most truly, S. Palmer.
P.S. Ere you reprint Etching and Etchers I should like you t<
see Holman Hunt's little etching of the Sphinx and the tent
.... You would delight in it. It seems to me to be a precious
little gem of sentiment, and perfect in the executive. I entire!)
love it.

XC. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, November, 1872.
My dear Mr. Valpy, . . . There is a superlative treat al
the Print Room, British Museum, (that is there would be, if we
were in any proper sense of the word a civilized nation) fine
photographs of all the Vatican sculpture. But what do pheasant-
popping squires care for Vatican sculpture ? . . .
I am so eccentric as not to worship the dog like my country
men and the old Egyptians, but do endeavour to keep steadily
before me the tenacity of the bull-dog. It is a great example
Our reason for dog-worship lies in the depths of human nature.
Praise is sweet, but from a human creature- we can never be sure
that it is quite sincere. Now the veneration of a dog for his
master is entirely so.
To their respective dogs, Alcibiades and Mr. William Sykes
were the ideals of perfection. Dogs worship us, therefore we
worship dogs ; an idolatry which has something equitable in it at
all events, and considering the dog's faithfulness and intelligence,
much more rational than the worship of gold, which has no intelli
gence and maketh itself wings and flieth away.
Roger Ascham says truly, that men are more careful of their
studs and kennels than about the culture of their children ; and I

SAMUEL PALMER.

34'

take worship to mean the extreme devotion of the affections and
intellect to any given object.
" My son, give me thine heart!' Here seems, to be the danger
of poetry, in whatever way developed, lest those vvho have any
portion, great or small, of its influence, should love the gift more
than the Giver.
Much should I enjoy a talk with yourself and Mrs. Valpy
about your late tour. Alas, the weather was unfavourable and
though storms are poetical, a skinned umbrella is apt to disturb a
train of thought . . .
I scribbled this hasty line . . and must now go to bed.
Sleeping or waking, Yours, S. Palmer.
" These are our drowsie daies, in vain
We do now wake to sleep again.
O come that hour, when we shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever."
XCI. To Mrs. Robinson.
[Formerly Miss Julia Richmond.] Furze Hill, December 9, 1872.
My DEAR Mrs. Robinson. Your Iona passage gives me more
pleasure than Dr. Johnson's, though it is one of his finest, " To
abstract the mind etc." Read it in the fournal. I should not be
inclined to encourage the young lady's walking efforts, but should
prefer crawling and kicking, which are with the strongest children
the first natural movements, and in the stronger sex an important
element of advancement in after life.
What is statesmanship but successful crawling and kicking ?
With a view to this, at our public schools, the fag crawls to be
kicked, and in his turn kicks the fag who crawls to him : and the
ruling powers are far too cunning to abolish a system which so
perfectly represents and so admirably prepares for the requirements
of public life.
Politics however often reverse the process. Pulteney kicked
long and lustily before he crawled into the Earldom of Bath ; and
this is found to be very successful in detail : you kick and squabble
a little with the givers of good things, just to make moral capital
by it, but always let your stubborn honesty be convinced by their
arguments.

342 THE LETTERS OF
Illness apart, parental anxieties begin when a child begins to
walk ; for beginning to walk is beginning to tumble. It is a
defiance of gravitation, and Newton is sometimes avenged. By
" natural selection " they come down upon sharp corners, edges of
fenders or coal-scuttles ; or, if precocious ambition prompts them to
rise by crawling, a little head is seen near the top of a steep stone
staircase, while the " square of the distance " is growling for its
prey at the bottom.
Fastened into my little chair, screwed into its stool, I can just
remember the whole coming down with a crash ; my mother
screaming ; Riga balsam applied (sovereign for cuts) ; and here I
am, alas, writing nonsense in my old age, no chair of discipline it
would seem having been screwed into the " stool of repentance."
But, seriously, Margate is a noble place for air is it not ? I
heard all about Iona's weighings, and her daily increase of gravity,
which had reached its acme when I sought and found her on the
cliffs. She was entirely polite, and more in sorrow than in anger
seemed to say, " Your manners are plausible — your principles
inadmissible." Her fair junior, whom you maligned, seemed rather
interested in the " singular old gentleman."
He, in turn, is really pleased and more than pleased that you
should sympathize with the simple details of his pilgrimage.
Sorrow, in its saddest phase of bereavement, has followed him ;
yet, perhaps, without sorrow there is little sympathy for others. By
sympathy I do not mean any amount of good-nature, but fellow
ship in suffering.
Without free street-fellowship, open air all day, and gambols by
the kennel-side, with negation of brain work, London is a sorry
place to bring up children in. " Alexandrina, you little muck,
come out of the gutter ! " a mother exclaimed. It would have been
to little purpose had she set the little muck to grind decimals,
which are said to be so cultivated in one of our Reigate schools as
to leave the poor little girls scarce any time for plain needle-work.
Can there be folly more infatuated than that which would leave
the children of the poor ignorant of household management and
practical duties ? Muriatic acid, is it not, which now so pervades
the London atmosphere as to render building impossible without
speedy corrosion of the stone ? Before the east end of West
minster Palace was finished, the west end had begun to rot ;

SAMUEL PALMER. 343
and what will peel a stone wall is not likely to put flesh upon
a baby. Then there is the filthy gas. Muses of Phlegethon
assist the mortal who would set forth half its loathsomeness!
Destroying vegetation (the noble suburban elms which Milton
celebrated, rotting to pieces), ancient muniments, and toughest
parchment ; and yet, forsooth, through blind subserviency to
custom, admitted into our dwelling-houses ; and, incredible as
such wicked carelessness may seem, even into our nurseries !
Such, with the visible typhus steaming up through the drain vents
in the street, is the atmosphere in which wc strive to rear the
tenderest infancy. No horse-breeder or dog-trainer would consent
to rear his whelps or fillies in such a medium.
But in everything which does not relate to dogs and horses,
our national idols, we follow each other like sheep to the slaughter
house. Life itself we hold cheaply, if it may not be preserved by
precedent. " I would rather die," said a lady, " under Sir Henry
Halford, than be cured by an)- one else."
Often and often I bless my father's memory for making me
repeat almost daily, " Custom is the plague of wise men, and the
idol of fools." .... I will just remark that, in the article you read,
there is a mistake of ten years as to the date of my first exhibited
picture, as in 1809 I nad n°t very long emerged from long clothes
— not long enough, at least, to approximate the hope of pockets
and "inexpressibles." The first exhibition I saw (in 1819) is
fixed in my memory by the first Turner, The Orange Merchant
man on tlie Bar ; and, being by nature a lover of smudginess, I
have revelled in him from that day to this. May not half the Art
be learned from the gradations in coffee-grounds ? . . . . Believe
me, Ever affectionately yours, S. Palmer.

1874
XCII. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
Furze Hill, February, 1874.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. Your son's etching has given pleasure
to other than " parental " eyes. " What a sweet little etching,"
said my wife, who saw it lying on the table, " It is like an old
master." There is something touching in the sight of a beginner
full of curiosity and hope. My yearning always is, " O ! that he

344 THE LETTERS OF
may escape the rocks on which I split " : years wasted, any one of
which would have given a first grounding in anatomy — indispen
sable anatomy, to have gone with to the antique. The bones are
the master key ; the marrowless bones are the talisman of all life
and power in art. Power seems to depend upon knowledge of
structure ; all surface upon substance. Knowing this, and imbued
with the central essence, we may venture to copy the appearance,
perhaps even imitate it. It does not seem to me that we have the
alternative of copying or imitation, but that copying as upon oath
precedes and is the condition of imitation.
Minus the name pray make what use you please of the barrowful
of debris which I sent you from a mountain of doubt.
Thank you for the newspaper extract,1 which is curiously the
reverse of what you have been teaching the public, viz. the scope
and compass of etching, its unlimited power of expression, and
ductility in the hand of every artist to his individual purpose. Here,
is the extract, it is curtailed to a function much better realized by
lithography. Surely a rather uncertain chemical process on metal
is not the medium in which to render " a few lines " " sternly clear,"
especially if pencil or charcoal quality is wanted, and pen line to
be eschewed. It is some time since I saw a fine collection of
Rembrandt's etchings, but my impression is that, in every instance,
they are the better in the ratio of the labour ; some of the finest
being exquisitely finished, and as etchings, the more essentially
precious. What wonder, if the labour be a labour of love ? Are
not Jacquemart's fine in the ratio of his labour of love ? Would
Veyrassat's Crossing the Ford [a plate in The Portfolio.] have been
bettered by slightness ? Is not tone the prerogative of etching, and
chiaroscuro its territory ? 
You mention mezzotint in connection with etching. It seems
to me that, in some degree, the deep shades of mezzotint differ for
the worse from those of etching, in much the same way as the
shadows of an oil picture painted on a half-tint ground from the
shadows of one on a white ground. I mean when a year or two
has done its work with the former. The cases too are analagous
as to time ; mezzotint, beautiful as it is, and low-toned grounds,
bad as they are, being more rapid and cashy. One of the finest
qualities of etching seems to me to be a certain luminousness even
f1 Ruskin's letter on Etching addressed to The Architect.— Ed.]

'<

,-n

SAMUEL PALMER. 345
in its dark shades ; in all but the very darkest : and, if this be a
" bull," it is the fault of the fact.
Etching, regarded from your point of view, does seem to be the
finest of the metal methods; and it can easily be shown to be
better than wood-cutting, which lacks variety in its dark shadows,
though the sparkle of its light is joyous. Then let its flashes
illuminate etching; let all be inclusive and cumulative. What is
any art but that which genius has made it by extending its
boundaries, while criticism demurred at ever)- venture ? Whence
this strange gratification in scraping art with a potsherd, and
paring the eye-lids of Regulus ?
I have been reading again Fuseli's Lectures (our best, I think).
Your son would enjoy them if he is fond of reading about art. He
wrote in vain, it seems, as for the last thirty years we have been
walking backwards, not towards nature but naturalism.
The Philosophers, who are by no means too imaginative, can set
us right. Lord Bacon says it is the office of poetry to suit the
shows of things to the desires of the mind.1 We seem to aim at
suiting the desires of the mind to the shows of things. Does not
the former imply a much more profound and inclusive study of the
" shows of things " — "nature," as we call it, itself ? What was it
but his ideal of Helen which obliged the Greek to study all the
most beautiful women he could find ?
When I was setting out for Italy I expected to see Claude's
magical combinations. Miles apart I found the disjointed members,
some of them most lovely, which he had suited to the desires of
his mind. There were the beauties ; but the Beautiful — the ideal
Helen, was his own : and the sense of this ideal is so lost and for
gotten by a materialistic age that Claude himself is considered
rather as an accomplished master of aerial perspective, or what
not, than as the genius, equally tender and sublime, who re-opened
upon canvas the vistas of Eden.
But is not all this gaseous rhodomontade about the Ideal
exploded by the fact that every artist worthy of the name finds it
almost impossible to render one tithe of its beauty when he sits
down either to copy or to imitate the simplest object ? I think
not ; and it seems to me that, in the present state of our faculties,
any system which is without its paradoxes is, by the same token,
\} The Advancement of Learning. Book 2, IV. — Ed.]

346 THE LETTERS OF
as suspicious as the exact correspondence of several witnesses in a
trial at the Old Bailey.
As a discipline of exactness Mulready recommended the copy
ing sometimes objects which were not beautiful, to cut away the
adventitious aid of association. A very inaccurate imitation of a
bunch of grapes will be pleasing in virtue of the subject ; but
when I have gone to school to a potato in black and white chalk,
I have found it difficult to make it unmistakably like.
Would other demands upon time permit, it seems to me that, at
any stage of a painter's progress, it would be useful frequently to
copy some simple object of still life, that exactness which is the
common honesty of art might never be on the wane. 1 It would
seem to be negation, or a contracted power unable to reach the
opposites, that makes cold, unimpassioned art. In its relation to
landscape, Fuseli says : — 3 " The landscape of Titian, of Mola, of
" Salvator, of the Poussins, Claude, Rubens, Elsheimer, Rembrandt,
" and Wilson, spurns all relation with this kind of map-work. To
" them nature disclosed her bosom in the varied light of rising,
" meridian, setting suns ; in twilight, night and dawn. Height,
" depth, solitude, strike, terrify, absorb, bewilder in their scenery.
" We tread on classic or romantic ground, or wander through the
" characteristic groups of rich congenial objects. . . ."
I extract also the following : it may be perhaps useful to your
son, if he follow the art and desire to catch it. He says of Titian,
who was sent in his tenth year to the school of Giovanni Bellini,
that, under him and Sebastiano Zuccati, he acquired while a boy
" a power of copying the visible detail of the objects before him
" with that correctness of eye and fidelity of touch which distinguish
" his imitation at every period of his art. Thus when, more adult,
"in emulation of Albert Diirer, he painted at Ferrara Christ to
" whom a Pharisee shows the tribute money, he outstript in subtlety
" of touch even that hero of minuteness. The hair of the heads and
" hands may be counted, the pores of the skin discriminated, and
" the surrounding objects seen reflected in the pupils of the eyes ; yet
" the effect of the whole is not impaired by this extreme finish : it
" increases it at a distance . . . . " &c.
I1 Taken in conjunction with my father's other opinions on art, this is a noteworthy
passage. — Ed.]
[- Lecture IV. " Invention," part 2. — Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. u7
This will not be new to you, nor anything I have said above.
Then why did I say it ? Why indeed ? In my last, I performed
Morgiana among the oil jars " by particular desire " ; this latter
looks very like garrulity, so please accept the apologies of Yours
most truly, S. Palmer.
P.S. By way of one last word a propos of the " shows of
things," I will add that I saw the arrangement of your sunset
river from a boat near Chelsea, and noticed it as a first-rate land
scape theme — the dazzling silver, or rather diamond-flakes of
tumbling water under the golden sunset. Now here was the " show
of things"; but inasmuch as the falling water, looking quite pure
by reason of its polish, was evidently, from its position, and some
deplorable brickwork seen partially between the trees, nothing
more nor less than the issue of a sewer, or filthy factory slush,
into insulted Father Thames, the " desires of the mind " were far
from being completely satisfied.
The mountain stream fulfils them.

XCIII. To Mr. George Richmond.
Furze. Hill, June i, 1874.
My dear Friend. I wish you were here this morning, the
first genial one almost for the last two months, after those blighting
east winds.
First and foremost, let me congratulate you on dear Willy's
success (he'll knock us down if we call him " Willy " now) ; it is
delightful to think that so much study and enterprise should have
its reward. Should The Right Hon. William Pitt ] (to quote the Academy
Catalogue) be invited to join the new ministry at Trafalgar Square,
we should both be glad, as it woulJ in a manner consolidate Blake's
identity in our archives. You did your utmost during a season's
administration ; placing him on the Botticelli Treasury benches
(what a treasury that room was !) but now his name flits about
again with no beseeming register, and if he be singled out from
the host of British Painters as being unworthy of a place in the
P The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth, a picture by Blake. It appeared
in the catalogue as quoted in the text. — Ed.]

348 THE LETTERS OF
Gallery of his native land, I do think it time for his native land to
buy a " fan " and blush.
As to the Pitt, I can truly say that I have scarcely thought of
pounds, shillings, and pence in connection with it ; yet it is the
farthest from my thoughts, as a political economist would say, to
" pauperize " the British Lion by making him a present of what
he might think scarcely worth a wag of his tail if he took it in alms.
Now that Mr. Burton is at the helm, who knows but that even
a Fuseli may be brought into port ? How I should delight to see
there my love of ancient days, Psyche coming to the Fates.
" What is that ? " said a lady to her mate, as I was drinking it
in at Somerset House. " O ! that's imagination',' said he, with a
most contemptuous emphasis upon the word. "Come along!"
giving her a vigorous pull to the next picture.
It is one of the curious paradoxes in which the world of fact
differs from the world of theory and logic, that though Fuseli is
often bombastic and usually mannered through insufficient study
of the visible, yet he is essentially poetical and sometimes sublime.
I remember your saying of him years ago, " The expression may
be imperfect, but its intention is right." No painter of our time
gathered about him such a host of of non-admirers. Coleridge,
I think, nicknamed him " Fuzzle," or " Fuzzly." Again, after many
years, I have been reading his Life and Lectures. Such a reminder
of old times. Where are stowed away all his hundreds of designs
on paper, like that pen and ink line of Balaam of which Mr.
Linnell has a lithograph ?
But " where " is a sad word. Where is Banks's bas-relief lately
over the doors of the quondam British Ga'lery ; where is that
grand cartoon of Michelangelo which you and I used to visit
together ? Where is that essence of Rome in Turner's Loggie with
La Fornarina — utterly ruined through sparing a few pounds-worth
of glass ? Where will be the poetic mystery of St. Paul's dome
when they have succeeded by mosaics, or what not, in their frightful
purpose of "filling it with light" — doing away with Thornhill's
painted architecture which binds all together, and completes the
perspective (otherwise somewhat questionable), in the concentric
slope of the pilasters over the Whispering Gallery ; faultless at
present. Where is Marc Antonio's print of part of Leonardo's
cartoon The Battle of the Standard?

SAMUEL PALMER. ,.,,,
To pass from "where" to "when," my wife wants to know
when we may expect, what would delight us both, a long day's
visit from yourself and Mrs. Fichmond. There is just a bit of
myself left to help to receive you, convalescent from my old
acquaintance the asthma, which, with ray other ailments, the
doctor lays to the weather, saying that these late east winds find
out such patients, even in their beds.
I am much concerned to hear or rather read, if I read aright, that
you have been for some time unwell : having asked several friends,
from time to time, and had a good account, it takes me by surprise.
How these ailments hinder locomotion ! No exhibition seen
yet — no Churt visit, after such a kind invitation from Hook.
Those who are now nearly at their journey's end leave the world
at a crisis of its history. Wars of interest have their term, but a
war of principles, being international and universal, is terrible to
think of. To me there is a blessed solace in the belief that the
present dispensation is near its close, and I cannot without wonder
hear big children vaunting about " progress," just as things seem
to be coming to a dead lock. It seems to me that no national
conjunction can be more perilous than that of gigantic enterprise
and wealth with a spirit of godless independency. Even the
Pagans considered such implied boastfulness dangerous and unfor
tunate. Yet, during the last half century, men have been disabused
of much prejudice and error, and, in a few centuries more, might
redeem the calamitous errors of the past, on one single condition —
no less than a total change of their nature ! Those who believe in
its perfectibility through improved circumstances without wonder
at the failure of all their efforts, and will continue to wonder : but
those who believe, look forward with a cheerful and unwavering
hope to the " new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth
righteousness." How strangely the pen wanders from subject to subject. Steel
pens are excellent correctives of digression, as they make the act
of writing disagreeable and restrain sudden sallies with a catch or
a splutter. Having a goose-quill in hand, I will check the contagious
tendency of that pompous bird to wander over a wide common of
topics, and yours affectionately S. PALMER will say at once, with
the clergyman at Lullingstone, " This is the end."
P.S. fune 3, 1874. After all, I have not approached your ques-

350 THE LETTERS OF
tion : "Winifred Jenkins" would have spoken more to the purpose!
I do not wish to " fix it rigidly " at £500 and I think the nation
ought not to have it for less than .£300. I think it is worth £500
to the nation ; but if Britannia, while I am in my present mind,
held me out a cheque for 300 guineas filed on the end of her
trident, I would approach cautiously, lest it should be a ruse to
spike me, take it with a long pair of tongs, and invest it. As a sum
between five and three I will leave it wholly to your better judge
ment. It would seem to depend somewhat upon the style in which
the Directors are used to traffic. There are some who don't like to
buy anything at the price asked, nor without the pleasure of
beating it down.
I would buy a blushing-fan bigger than Mr. G's if it were
/, simply, for whom you were taking trouble : but you are seeking
(to speak paganishly) to soothe the shade of Blake, which we seem
to see hovering about the Gallery's portico, and hitherto, though
not NOW, regarded unfavourably by the police.1

XCIV. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
Furze Hill, Late on Friday night, October, 1874.
My dear Friend. Mr. and Mrs. [John Wright] have just
departed, and our Reverend friend has read me some passages from
Herbert Spencer's First Principles.
These philosophers want to make our minds as acute as
possible. Shortly after I was breeched, I wanted to have my first
penknife made as sharp as possible, but it was explained to me
that it would do nothing but shave ; and that, used for any other
purpose, the edge would turn.
Lord Bacon thought that even a lawyer's mind might be too
acute, because " whatever sharpens narrows." A man who says, " I
think, therefore I am," will proceed to the next question. " As I
am, what ought I to do ? " And will set to work. But a very
acute man says, " I think, therefore I seem to be." Is not this
rather a moonshiny way of beginning a life at the longest very
short, and yet with so much to be done in it ?
A more serious matter is this : to receive the teaching of these
gentlemen we must hypothetically deny Christianity ; and is there
P The picture referred to was ultimately bought for the National Gallery. — Ed.]

SA M UE I. PA 1. ME R. 35 r
not danger that he who watches to seize ever)- opportunity for
evil may try to make out of this hypothetical denial a real
apostasy, and convey doubts into our minds which may cause us
many agonies of remorse. They say the "Absolute is unknow
able." The Bible says — our Lord Himself says, " And this is life
eternal, that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom thou hast sent."
St. Paul says, " And even as they did not like to retain God in
their knowledge, God gave them over," &c. ; and again, " The Lord
Jesus shall be revealed from Heaven with his mighty angels, in
flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God and
that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Is it not perilous, even hypothetically, to entertain propositions
which profess to lead upwards (?) through the physical sciences to
a conviction that we can never know God ? Moreover, this
elaborate system of negation requires half a life to get together its
scientific apparatus, which is to end in paralysis of doubt, dimming
our best perceptions, and removing all the most stirring and noble
incentives to labour.
I have been reading the life of John Stuart Mill, and have been
struck with the result, after all their knowledge and thought, in an
incapability for worthy action, nay, in imbecility on their own
strong points, both in father and son. The father's political
ultimatum was the widest possible representation even with our
present untaught constituencies.
David Hume treating of Morals treats the chastity of women
as a mere fudge except where it happens to be expedient.
Now a labourer's son at a Sunday school who has been care
fully catechised and really is trying to do his duty to God and to
his neighbour as set forth in the catechism is, I think, farther
advanced in real education than a master of negations, though he
may have learned languages, attended lectures, and walked
hospitals, to elaborate, in the most ingenious propositions, his own
and everybody else's nonentity.
All this is so much more demonstration (if more were wanted)
of the truth of God's words, " The world by wisdom knew not
God." " But the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit
of God for they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know
them, because they are spiritually discerned."

352 THE LETTERS OF
We are told also, which is exactly to the point, that man
cannot "by SEARCHING find out God," but that God reveals
these things by the Spirit to the spirit of man : and that the way
to " know of the doctrine, whether it be of God " is to do the will
of God. Mere human success and mastery of any art is not to be
attained by first knowing all there is to be known about it, but by
trying to do, while you are trying to know how to do better.
" He that cometh to God must believe that he is," says the
Apostle. Now is not the influence of a book, to say the least,
perilous, which tends, when we kneel down to our prayers, to cast
over the mind flying doubts, or at least momentary misgivings,
whether we, baptized Christians, are after all not praying to a
shadow ?
My spirit is stirred, and hence these hasty and probably ill
spelt and unstopped sentences — but pardon Yours affectionately,
S. Palmer. 1875
XCV. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Furze Hill, February 1, 1875.
Mv DEAR Mr. Valpy. " I have done the deed. Didst thou not
hear^a noise ? " A noise of my groaning when, according to Herbert's
advice, I was " girding up my loins " to attempt the enclosed
descriptions [of the Miltons] or whatever they may be called.
It was no fancied difficulty ; for in trying to describe the
motive or impulse of a picture, which is or ought to be fervid,
it seems to be implied that the painter has realized his idea, else,
what is the use of describing it ? And whether he has done so is for
others to decide. " Let another man praise thee, and not thine own
mouth." If the painter says : " From the skirts of an ancient forest the
eye is led to a parapet of granite mountain stretching far away,
through a break in which there is a glimpse of a vast champaign,
while the golden moon is just emerging from the more distant
ocean ", it is hard to discern that he is not complimenting his
own picture, for an equivalent in painting to those few words
demands great mastery. As my father-in-law once remarked, it is
easier to say " Jack Robinsoff " than to paint " Jack Robinson."

SAMUEL PALMER. 353
Vastly different were the task, or rather pleasure, of comment
ing upon another man's picture : the string of one's tongue is loosed ;
at every inspection, if it be really fine work, we find new beauties ;
and what we do not find we fancy ; so that if the artist were to
come to life, he would say with Socrates, " What does not this
young man fable of me ? "
I remember a learned D.D. who, when people asked him
whether some eloquent preacher did not " bring a great deal out of
a text," was wont to answer, " Yes ; a great deal more than ever
was in it ! "
But the real charm of art seems to me not to consist in what
can be best clothed in words, or made a matter of research or dis
covery. Its technical means are conversant with several branches
of science ; and it demands lifelong investigation of phenomena ;
but I do not think that the result is a science, though Constable
very truly said that every picture was a scientific experiment. The
result I take to be not interpretation, but representation — its first
appeal not to the judgement but the imagination.
Lord Stafford's house- maid stood leaning on her broom before
that wondrous Claude, not because it excited or gratified her
curiosity, but because " she thought she was in Heaven."
No man, perhaps, more perfectly rendered his genuine percep
tions than the elder Cuyp, in those groups of milch kine beside a
brimming river, with maid or swain ; all bathed (if a river can
be bathed !) in amber light. Now here is ample matter for ex
cogitation — hydrostatics, cattle-breeding, &c. ; yet I doubt whether
any one who could feel his charm ever excogitated at all before the
works either of the elder or younger Cuyp. Painters excogitate to
find out how it was done. Turner based much of his colouring
upon these masters ; but this is an after affair ; if we are gifted
with the seeing eye we feel before we think .... Yours, S.
Palmer. XCVI. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
Furze Hill House, April 15, 1875.
My dear Mr. Wright. Many thanks for the extract, which I
have carefully put away for you until you are furnished with an
indexed commonplace-book like Herbert's. A A

354 THE LETTERS OF
Who would have thought that Swift was less English than
Johnson ? Yet from one single language (the Latin) Johnson
probably adopted more words than Swift or Gibbon. Fewer
words, if they are all from one language, leave a more exotic im
pression on the memory than a collectively greater number from
several languages.
Moreover, Johnson liked to teaze the Celtic-simplicity-people,
now and then, with a sonorous Latin trumpet-blast, and one of
these impresses memory more than twenty muffled explosions.
To me, the most curious thing is the moderate extent of
Milton's vocabulary ; seeing that it is perhaps, effectively, the richest
in our tongue. In the poetry of prudence a word is a word ; in
the poetry of (Plato's) madness it is many ; and all the best poets
are out of the body while they write, though the bodily hand holds
the pen. Yet on referring to the most superhuman passages we
find the words simple : so placed, however, under the divine frenzy
that one word does duty for many. So, in real music, the simplest
change of key occurring at the right time in the right place, effects
everything ; as the " shadows brown!' in Handel's setting of //
Penseroso, are solemnized in a moment by descending one semi
tone upon the adjective ; going into the key of the- 4th, if I
remember rightly.
The barbaric blurters of unprepared discords could not have
effected it by any amount of hideousness.
A friend of mine of exquisite musical taste [Mr. F. O. Finch],
who was one of the mourners at Sir Thomas Lawrence's funeral,
always remembered, as the procession entered the west door of St.
Paul's, a flattened seventh in the bass of the organ, then solemnly
rolling : it was in its right place. The mere thing itself occurs
continually. But moderns who have stimulated their musical appetite with
burrs, and thistles, and prickles, find everything else insipid ;
Corelli's harmonies are " thin " they say. " Make the gruel thick
and slab."
Well ! these things are all vanity compared with the " things
which are above " ; yet, perhaps, things which are in good taste
bear the closer analogy with things morally good and holy. By
the bye, what an absurdity it seems to seek for the things that are
above, in physics, or the laboratory, though that will furnish beautiful

SAMUEL PALMER. 3S5
analogies. Our so called " philosophers " seem like perverse little
boys who go to the butcher's for toffee and to the sweet-shop for
kites, and then put their knuckles into their eyes and run down
the street howling, because they can get neither kites nor toffee.
Yours ever, S. PALMER.

XCVII. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
Furze Hill, May, 1875.
My dear Friend. Too much of the ludicrous enervates the
mind, yet who can repress a smile when a gentleman is running
after his hat, or a philosopher after an " invariable law," which, by
the terms of the game, he can never overtake till it is stopped by
the outer wall of eternity ?
A spice of the droll sometimes flavours very serious matters,
such as the deposition of an eastern magnate when we assure him
that he is not deposed on account of misconduct of which he has
just been acquitted ! Our dear and Reverend friend begged me to
write to you on the subject, remembering a conversation which
took place in this room a few weeks before the upshot.
I do not take credit to myself for anticipating anything so
ridiculous, having merely suggested generally that few obstacles
are suffered to stand in the way of political expediency — " of com
mercial expediency either," I might have added. We have an
instance of each in the same reign, the massacre of Glencoe, and
the breach of faith with the settlers at Darien, whose bleached
skeletons long whitened the coast.
To change the subject, what a refreshing thing is good sense
lucidly expressed. Here is a morsel from The Spectator? No. 1 10.
(Addison doubtless, from other marks, although that paper has
neither of his distinguishing initials "C. L. I. O.") After ridiculing
rustic credulity, the author says, " At the same time, I think a
" person who is thus terrified with the imagination of ghosts and
" spectres, much more reasonable than one who, contrary to the
" reports of all historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern,
1 Note. — Adverting to microscopic criticism, we may observe that it does not follow
from a sentence being wrong when we take it to pieces that it is not quite right when put
together : the sun has spots ; the flame of a farthing candle has none. A A 2

356 THE LETTERS OF
" and to the traditions of all nations, thinks the appearance of
" spirits fabulous and groundless."
This is the motto of Dr. Lee's new book, Glimpses of the Super
natural ; in which, by the way, he mentions some Oxford under
graduates of 1829, who found a shorter cut to godlessness than
boring to it through physical induction. They formed a Hell Fire
Club which used to meet twice a week at Brazenose ; each trying
to outdo the rest in blasphemy. The authorities suspected
something, but could not discover their whereabout. Towards a
midnight in December, 1829, one of the Fellows of Brazenose,
returning home down the narrow lane connecting the square in
which Brazenose faces All Souls, with Turl Street, saw what
appeared to be a tall man helping some one to get out of one of
the fenced windows of Brazenose. Rushing forward he saw a
student, his form and features distorted with agony, being forcibly
dragged out between the iron stanchions. He rushed past, to the
chief entrance, and fell down in a swoon. Just then there arose a
cry from a crowd of students rushing out from a set of rooms
immediately to the right of the porter's lodge. They were
members of the " Club." In the utterance of a volley of blas
phemy the occupant of the rooms had suddenly broken a blood
vessel, and was lying dead upon the floor. " The account was
current in my days (1850)," says Dr. Lee. A version of the story
is also in Odds and Ends, London, 1872. Dr. Lee has the Glamis
story too. Yours affectionately, S. PALMER.

XCVIII. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
[May, 1875.]
My dear Mr. Valpy. How happy you must have been af Wells
under such favourable circumstances ! When the love of God
makes sunshine within a house, we can bear with wet weather
without. I will not say
" Earth hath not anything to show more fair,"
but earth hath not many things to show more fair than the west
front of Wells Cathedral. It shows what Christian art might
have become in this country, had not abuses brought it down with
a crash, and left us, after three centuries, with a national preference

SAMUEL PALMER. 357
of domesticated beasts and their portraits, before all other kinds of
art whatsoever. I must have ill expressed my meaning if it seemed that I
would exclude geological drawing from art drawing. It seems to
me that art drawing includes it, as figure drawing includes
anatomy. Probably the confusion arose from those who seem to
me the great rock and earth Masters being supposed by others to
be geologically incorrect.
The visible characteristics of the various rocks were as patent to
artists before their history ( ? ) was attempted, as since the conflict
of opinion began as to their modification by fire, water, ice, and what
not ; the great " discovery " that the earth made itself and was never
created by the Almighty not being, I should suppose, of any parti
cular service to the painter !
I do not know whether the rocks upon which Nicholas Poussin
has seated Polyphemus have ever been gainsaid. They affect the
imagination, and if they failed to affect mine, I should feel that I
had gained a loss, by an)- supposed knowledge which had lessened
their impression. Had this happened to me after much study of
geological diagrams, I should feel that my knowledge was dispro
portioned, and that I wanted much more of some other kind of
knowledge to set me right.
Last year, at Margate, I made several observations and
memoranda upon certain reflections of sky in sea, which seemed
to violate the most obvious optical " laws " ; and I think we shall
never see rightly unless we bring science and knowledge of the
individual refinements and niceties of nature into contact with an
equal amount of art knowledge, and the phenomena which modify
individualities. Nature knowledge and art knowledge ought to be in harmony,
but they are two distinct things. Nothing would please me more
than to spend a year in resuming my old studies of botanical
minutiae. It would replenish the mind with a world of delicate
refinement, but it would not give that perception which " laps me in
Elysium " at the sight of a fine (uncleaned) Claude : nor would any
amount of geological diagrams bring my soul in unison with Nicho
las Poussin's Polyphemus : rather, perhaps, it might incline me to
pick holes in it.
I think that the great landscape-painters used as much of literal

358 THE LETTERS OF
truth as was necessary in order to " make the ideal probable," and
that minute criticism will never be more prone to object than
when they showed the chief mastery of art in knowing what to
omit. I think the Callisto rocks should be studied in order to see
nature. I have heard one of the most eminent living painters express his
gratitude to art for the specific reason that it taught him to see
nature. Turner, who of all men was the most pronounced disciple
of Claude (painting large pictures of avowed companionship with
certain of his great masters'), learned from Claude, Poussin, &c, how
to see nature ; to see nature in its proper aspect and position rela
tively to art. I remember some Savoy pictures by Turner in which
he was bringing to bear very evidently what he had been learning
from the Poussins.
It is thus, I think, that the great original painters and poets
are made. They differ from inferior men by having at once more
of their own and more of other people's : more of their own and
more of their masters'.
I dislike writing about art because the comparative ease of
talking twits me with the difficulty of doing : and nothing is more
true than the " de gustibus." If a youth of seventeen is not charmed
by a fine Claude, no amount of art or nature-culture will avail him :
but Turner, in common with the maid who leaned on her broom at
Stafford House, had the faculty to which Claude never appeals in
vain. Next time I hope not to talk shop. Excuse hasty first words,
and with our united best regards to yourself and Mrs. Valpy (who
saw with you the Cheddar rocks, I hope), I remain Yours most truly,
S. Palmer. XCIX. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Furze Hill, May, 1875.
My dear Mr. Valpy. When we had the pleasure of seeing
you, I said something concerning the principles of art which may
need a line of explanation. Perhaps that may be better done by a
statement of my belief, than in an argumentative way. If I make
positive assertions it is because it saves time to put suggestions in
that form ; and besides, it is quite in the fashion !

SAMUEL PALMER. i59
We cannot, as Mulready said, proceed a step without anatomy ;
and in landscape, without what is analogous to it.
We cannot rightly see or imitate what is before us without
understanding structure.
"Rock foregrounds." Geological drawing is not art drawing,
though the latter includes as much of it as may be wanted.
The last skill of imitation is to know what should be omitted.
Rocks should be studied from the Poussins : e.g. in the Callisto.
That is the finest mass I remember. I remember reading a critique
questioning the truth of a peculiar mass of rock in one of Claude's
pictures. I had seen none like it, but I did not measure Claude's
knowledge by my own ignorance. In my next tour, I came upon
the very thing and sketched it.
Very extensive knowledge of nature is requisite if we would
apprehend a tithe of what is contained in Claude and the
Poussins. If we are chiefly conversant with the tints and patterns of
nature, Gaspar will be a sad disappointment to us. We shall say
"Bless the man ! He seems to have tried how much he could
leave out."
In the painting of ground I think Claude is at the top. Indeed,
where is he not ? His knolls, so softly clad, are round and figure
like. As to trees he is indeed pre-eminent. Titian alone may
compare with him. Whether with pen or brush, in drawing, in
conception, in colour, they so imbue us with delight, that even
laudatory criticism is out of place. ... I wonder less and less
at Reynolds's saying, " The world may see another Raffaelle, but
never another Claude."
Claude, Poussin, Bourdon, did not attempt to satisfy that
curiosity of the eye which an intelligent tourist ever feeds and
never sates ; nor did they attempt to reproduce a scene : for they
knew that every hedgerow contains more matter than could be
crowded into a picture-gallery ; and that, supposing they could
deceive the eye, the real impression could not be completed but by
touch and hearing — the gushes of air and the singing of birds.
They addressed not the perception chiefly, but the IMAGINA
TION, and here is the hinge and essence of the whole matter.

360 THE LETTERS OF
I have observed all my life long that where there is imagination,
either among the greatest artists or those ignorant of art, and
whatever they like or dislike elsewhere, there is enchantment for
such minds in Claude.
His works, as Thomas Warton says of Lycidas, are a sure test
of imagination. Ordinary landscapes remind us of what we see in the country ;
Claude's, of what we read in the greatest poets and of their per
ception of the country, thus raising our own towards the same
level. " To Titian," says Fuseli, " to Mola, Salvator, the Poussins, to
" Claude, Rubens, Elsheimer, Rembrandt and Wilson, nature dis-
" closed her bosom in the varied lights of rising, meridian and setting
" suns ; in twilight, night and dawn. Height, depth, solitude, strike,
" terrify, absorb, bewilder in their scenery. We tread a classic or
" romantic ground, &c." Lecture 4. Works. Vol. 2, p. 217.
C. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
Furze Hill, November 2: 1875.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. It's rather like having a tooth drawn :
however, here I am in the chair, so pull away ! The " I consent "
has gone to Mr. Seeley. x
One thing I must ENTREAT you to do for me. Make it clear
that all is suggestion, not assertion ; though for brevity's sake it
may have taken that form. With this proviso, the oil-colour hints
are at your service, . . .
The scruples as to my own part involve no cowardice. The few
things I do know I am ready to assert though the parish laugh in
chorus at me ; but Art unites things in themselves remote ; Vision,
Matter, Science, for instance ; and so it came to pass that of some
of its wisest saws the reverse is equally true ; and this suggests
catholic scope and delicate handling.
We lose a great deal of truth, however, if we refuse, to believe
some things which, in the present state of our faculties, are contra
dictory ; verbally so I mean, for there are niceties of thought and
feeling which words, however well chosen, do but inadequately
express. f1 Mr. Hamerton's request had been for some technical notes for The Portfolio.— Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 361
1 am very glad to hear from you, having had some misgivings
that you had worked yourself to death, a kind of industry I
decidedly object to ; and I am sure Mrs. Hamerton will agree with
me on this subject ; with best regards to whom and to yourself,
believe me, Yours very truly, S. Palmer.

1S76
CI. To Miss Francks Redgrave.
[Furze Hill.] January, 1876.
Dear Preceptress. Man)- thanks for your kind remembrance
of an ailing friend ; especially at this time when advanced philosophy
is contriving for them the means of a painless quietus. Political
" Science " is tending this way, but does not speak out because of
some lingering prejudices against homicide. Owing to this, some
time may yet elapse before aged farm-labourers who are past work
will receive from their Board of " Guardians " a few drops of
prussic acid to stop the demand of their now unproductive muscles
for a little food and raiment out of the pockets of the rate
payers. I have much reason to be thankful that my working power
remains, and that my head, after the measure of its clearness, is
not more muddy than of old.
The doctor's horror of cold-catching confines me to a corner,
where there is room only for small work ; but upon that I
energize some hours in the forenoon, and after tea, by Silber's
lamp-light. As to imprisonment, it is only a pleasant " hermitage," as the
poet says, where there are many resources ; and books enable us
to keep the " very best society " without the trouble of going about
to seek it.
Many thanks for your mention of Casaubon's life. That of
his son would be interesting, were there sufficient material, from
the changeful times — the offers of Cromwell, including that most
tempting one of restoring to him his father's library, &c.
We owe the cartoons to Cromwell : he had a wide scope of
perception for whatever was sterling and noble ; and it is well that
attached members of the Church of England like you and me
should not suffer our notions of English history to be stultified by

362 THE LETTERS OF
the Divine Right politics of advanced ritualists. Dr. Neale
published a boy's history of England which I think the Star
Chamber would have pronounced to have been inspired !
An able friend of mine, rather high-church too in his views,
described the leaders of advanced ritualism as, for the most part,
men of weak heads and strong wills. Ritualistic art too is very
poor stuff — skinny saints and starved Madonnas. And as to
architecture, if St. Paul's could speak we should find it [could]
scarcely articulate, from the agitation of its narrow escape. Fancy
the putting frescoes into the dome to give it light, when its essence
is gloom and mystery !
Westminster Abbey is as unritualistic as can be. All is ideal
symmetry and design ; nothing of filigree, and scraps, and patch
work, lace fringes, or flummery. A Romanist bishop (French), not
long ago, finding in his cathedral an ornament of devout ladies'
needlework, ordered it away immediately saying, " This place is a
church, not a theatre." It seems to me that all ornament of surface
should be based upon structural grandeur.
If Christians love the " beauty of holiness," why should they
seek it in rag-tag ; and not rather, as Bishop Thirlwall suggested,
in noble architecture, music, and eloquence ? What havoc ultra-
ritualism makes of the two latter is best known to those who have
got cramp in the tongue in the effort to keep pace with the
profanely-gabbled responses, or slept under the Oxford drawl.
This is now the fault, as it has long been the misfortune of Oxford,
as they refused the endowment of a professorship for the purpose
of teaching them to read.
I shall never forget the service at Exeter Cathedral some
years ago, where time and rhythm were observed, as well as
melody. The love of unrhythmical melody is I think the sure mark of a
barbarian. In this kind of music the cats are beyond all
competition unrivalled : no prima donna can approach their subtle
enharmonics. I am grieved to hear of your dear uncle's continued indis
position ; a friend who never gave me an unkind word or look, and
concerning whom my only regret was that I could not see more of
him. Believe me, Most truly yours, S. Palmer.

SAMUEL PALMER. t(,;
CII. To Mr. Richard Redcirave.
[Furze I r i ii.. ] March, 1876.
MY Dear REDGRAVE. Ever to vou and yours the heartiest
reciprocation of your good wishes for the sand-martins !
You should write a tragedy, for vou can make the spirit leap
and the flesh creep, the former with Burlington House, the latter at
the very hint of a shop-prepared ground. No ! let the colourman
paint the picture rather than lay the priming. ... I hope the
James Ward tradition will be left by his son. The father told me
that his Bull, impasted as it is, would roll up without the least
cracking. His sons made the vehicle that he used, and alone are
acquainted with the method 
Rich painting with copal and amber will leave a first-rate shop
gesso ground, dropping clean off in large flakes. They make no
reticulated tooth in successive layers to lay hold of the touches in
whatever direction they may come. When this is delicately done
it yet leaves the ground quite smooth enough, and the brush has
always something to feel. The best oil grounds I ever saw were
brilliant with the best flake white used stiff, but with a little oil
copal in it ; not enough to make gloss, but enough to make it in
some degree homogeneal with the paint of the picture. But
doubtless you know all this and much more, so I have besmirched
myself with " carrying coals to Newcastle."
One word more. It is not pleasant to order absorbent grounds
(tempera I mean) at a first-rate shop, and to be supplied, as a
friend of ours was, with tempera grounds indeed, but washed for
the nonce over oil grounds !
I miss that friend much, for I learned much from him and it
was my own fault that I learned not much more. . . .
Ah vanity of vanities ! The Colin blue struck me just as it
has struck you; so keeping it for flowers and little touches on little
figures, the trouble was almost for nothing. But it was right, I
think, to take pains about it, because of its resemblance in powder
to the queen of hues, verditer— so like the infinitely retiring eastern
sky during the western after-glow. So one went back to dear old
Mother Ultramarine and her three less showy but inestimable
daughters the 1, 2 and 3 Ultramarine Ashes, bless them ! Verditer,
I think, will stand in tempera under varnish ; not so (judging from
a single experiment) verdigris.

364 THE LETTERS OF
I was trying, last night, to design something in charcoal with a
view to your cherished fixing fluid, and could not help feeling what
a different art etching would be if we could have the variety of
point, from sharp to very blunt, which we enjoy in charcoal.
Perhaps three or four of the finest etching-needles, or of strong,
common needles, welded close together, side by side, would do
it. . . .
I was delighted to hear from Sissy's very kind letter that our
friend Haden had not relapsed. What a shock to the whole system
such a shock must be ! I blessed the fair catalogue-sender from
my heart. Artists and the public are much indebted for the pains
you have taken in purveying them such a feast.
March $rd. Swathed like a mummy, and at the risk of my
worthless life, I went direct to Burlington House and back again,
with the exception, happy as it turned out, of a look at the Dudley
Gallery ; for I was delighted with a drawing of yours which has
remained in fond memory ever since. It is part of the Evelyn
Woods I think, with a little deep-blue, fine-weather sky, and is very
intricate, attracting the eye into the recesses : there is part of a
pond or mere seen under the trees. Surely without this poetic
intricacy, landscape loses nine tenths of its charm. . . . At
Burlington House the picture I was trying as for my life to inves
tigate was the Nicholas Poussin Callisto. Now one cannot stand
for an hour or more before a picture, without hearing a running
commentary from the BRITISH PUBLIC. With the single
exception of a bright young lady who told her party at once that
Areas was the individual who saw Diana bathing ( ! ! ), every one,
male and female, began with this formula : " Very strange ! — O !
A landscape, with the story of A rcas and Callisto. Nicholas Poussin.
I don't know what that is." A perceptive lady — one of those
terrible creatures who can detect your character from your signa
ture said, pointing to the Jove, "That figure sitting upon the eagle
is doubtless Our Lord. Yes, it must be so from the glory round
him : — but — but — the bear — I confess I can't make that out." A
" gentleman," after going through the formula, was much tickled
with the cloud. After enlarging on the absurdity of the whole
affair, he showed how nicely the cloud was shaped into steps for
the convenience of the non-gravitating passengers. Of all who
looked, not one loved, not one admired, not one approved.

SAMUEL PALMER. 365
And these seemed to be otherwise well educated people : the
cushioned and chicken-fed poodles left in their carriages were
perhaps at that moment on their hinders, making teeth at wayfaring
Christians out of the windows. O ! how different their masters
from the working men I have heard talking together with tasteful
alacrity before the Turners at South Kensington ! But then they
do that horrid " rattening."
I thought that stately Altieri Claude had been at some former
time injured by cleaning. That and a companion picture were
offered in Rome man)- years ago to a deceased friend of mine for
1,300 scudi. Only think ! About £ 1 60 each !
It is a very fine collection, and not the less gratifying for that
one has seen most of the pictures before, either with their pro
prietors, or at the British Gallery ; for they improve by repetition.
One feature is entirely new, the seeing them in so good a light ; and
how well they bear it.
I should have enjoyed a long look at the Leslies, but when I
thought it was about three o'clock my watch bade me instantly
depart to catch the last daylight train. . . . With best regards to
both houses, believe me, Most truly yours, S. PALMER.

CI 1 1. To Mr. T. O. Barlow.
Red Hill, September 30, 1876.
My dear Mr. Barlow. Accept my thanks for informing me,
through my son, of some very interesting propositions, otherwise
confidential, relating to the Etching Club. For myself I doubt
whether etching in the old sense of the word is not almost super
seded by the new art of retroussage added by the printer upon a
comparatively slight fabric. Sometimes it has been very effective,
but, in most instances, is so inferior to linear etching as to become
quite another art : but then, as it produces an effect quite as satis
factory to the public eye in about one fifth of the time, it beats
linear etching out of the market. It seems to me that the charm
of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the
shadows ; so that almost everything either sparkles, or suggests
sparkle. Now this is somewhat like the effect of a purely white
ground under an oil painting. The demonstrable difference may be

366 THE LETTERS OF
small, but the real deterioration of a dark ground is universal ; and,
not to quote irreverently, is "a darkness that may be felt" if it
cannot be proved. Well, retroussage, if not kept within narrow
bounds, extinguishes those thousand little luminous eyes which
peer through a finished linear etching, and in those of Claude are
moving sunshine upon dew, or dew upon violets in the shade. I
remain, Most truly yours, S. Palmer. 1877
CIV. To the Rev. J. P. Wright.
Furze Hill, May, 1877.
My dear Mr. Wright. I should have written long ago had
anything occurred to me which might have cheered your solitude,
but for news of this district I was wholly dependent upon you ; and
all else you have had in the newspapers.
Many thanks for your DAY IN DETAIL. What much com
forts me is your sticking close to the " publicans and sinners."
When the " respectable " people have done with these poor creatures,
especially the women, their one only tie of sympathy with their
kind is through the clergyman. I hate cant, but I really cannot
see how any of us can be quite sure that we are better than they ;
so much depends on surrounding influences and early habits.
Sin, however, lies heavily at the door of those who have suffered
their poor to live in pig-sties and ha've filched from them their
gardens. I have just met again with the statement (to us almost
incredible) that the act of Elizabeth forbade the building of any
cottage which had not " four acres '' of land attached to it.
" For whom would they work," we should say, " if they had so
much land of their own ? " What we esteem " so much " our
fathers set down as the minimum.
Mr. Tooth, you will have heard, has returned to his vicarage
like a " giant refreshed," and officiated in his church at 8 a.m. last
Sunday in a " richly embroidered chasuble " the day after the
vestment-prohibiting judgment had been given ! . . . .
Ever since a very brief account of the new judgment which I
met with in The Globe;Mr. Giles has continued to irrigate the
drought of my ignorance, ist by The Times of Monday, 2nd The
Daily Express, and this evening, Thursday, by a closely-printed
octavo volume 

SAMUEL PA L M E R. :,c,7
I suppose the " vestments," or simple surplice worn next Sunday
will manifest the intention of the respective wearers as to obedience
to the (secular) law, or its manifest defiance. The Apostles dis
obeyed, I think, their own Sanhedrim, but it seems hardly worth
while to pull this dear old Church of England about our ears for
vestments of any kind ; though how the Lords can pronounce the
cope illegal which was always worn in the cathedrals till War-
burton (afterwards bishop) threw his aside one day in a pet because
of some difficulty in getting it on is hard to see.
Dr. Irons wrote at once in The Daily Express beseeching for
patience on the part of his brethren. Hoping soon to have
something more to communicate, I remain, Affectionately yours,
S. Palmer. CV. To the Rev. J. P. Wright.
Furze Hill, June 2, 1877.
My DEAR Mr. Wright. Adverting to your interesting narra
tive, I suppose your experiences have long ago suggested that no
mere moral suasion, nothing indeed but the preaching of Christ
unto them, can move those who have long been in the fetters of
evil habits — nothing short of that miracle wrought by the Holy
Spirit when he shows to each true penitent the Saviour crucified,
not merely for all, but for himself individually, and thence awakens
that love and gratitude which can move mountains ; which can say
to this heap of guilt " be thou removed and cast into the sea." It
is only the love of Christ which can reverse the " tenfold-nature "
power of habit.
This alone renders credible the conversion of those Gentiles
into " Holy Brethren," " Members of Christ." Philip went down
into Samaria and " preached Christ unto them." Is there enough
of this in our pulpits ?
This marvellous power of the love of Christ, enduring through
nearly two thousand years, astonished Napoleon and made him
think little, in comparison, of military and imperial objects.1
It was the sense of a Saviour crucified for him (so strangely
impressed or suggested) which converted Col. Gardiner on the
P I am at a loss to imagine my father's authority for this statement. See Letter
CXVIII.-Ed.]

368 THE LETTERS OF
very evening of an assignation with a married woman. See
Dr. Doddridge's Life of Col. Gardiner; a "Tract Society" tract,
I believe. It was indeed, as our friend said to you, a marvellous change
wrought upon those Gentiles ; and now, to change the subject with
only this link of transition. Last Tuesday afternoon Mr. Palgrave
himself appeared ; looking, I thought, younger than when he left
for the Palace. All his family seem to get on pretty well in that
Westminster air of evil repute, but then they all go away four
months in the year. We went at it " hammer and tongs " for \\ or
2 hours on all sorts of subjects. He says Carlyle, it is thought,
must have been hoaxed with some utterly false report when he
wrote that Eastern Question letter to The Times, in which he said
that Government was going to do something which would bring
down all Europe upon us.
. . . Doubtless you sometimes have the sense of loneliness
drop suddenly upon you like a pall, or Dante's leaden cowls. But
the time will come when a pastor, who is a pastor indeed, will feel
anything but lonely ; meeting again, where there is no danger of
relapse, the fruits of his ministry, and can say, " Behold me and the
children whom thou hast given me."
If you feel lonely — a shepherd with a little flock upon a hill,
concentrate yourself upon that flock, and you will find that " There
is society where none intrudes " ; and think of my loneliness, frozen
up and crippled up from the haunts of men, from my London
friends — from that dearly-longed-for Blake exhibition, which was
a severance indeed ; and, now that you are gone, I know of the
two, perhaps, rather more of what happens in the moon than what
happens here. . . . Affectionately yours, S. PALMER.

CVI. To the Rev. J. P. Wright.
Furze Hill, June 9, 1877.
Dear Mr. Wright. I got The Life of Stirling for the sake of
the Coleridge sketch. I was much surprised to read of the view
of London, " big Paul's " &c. from Mr. Gilman's. By his kind per
mission I saw all the Coleridgeiana there ; went into C.'s study ; sat
in his seat in the garden ; and so far from seeing anything distant,
found the garden view, beyond a little meadow land, quite blocked by

SAMUEL PALMER. 369
Lord Mansfield's woods ; the view in front across a piece of spare
ground, backed by other Highgate houses. From what I noticed
of the position of the row of houses, one of which was Mr. Gilman's,
it seems that nothing short of the instrument described by Mr.
Weller Junr. in the witness-box could give a glimpse of London,
or any other distance, from any part of the premises.
What a dismal book it is ! A history of " Littlefaith robbed of
his jewels " ; not by foot-pads, but by the bad set of friends among
whom he had fallen, till they left him nothing to die upon but
Hume's " Leap in the dark." It is painful to see him hustled along
by them in their stumbling scuffle towards the outer darkness.
How soothing after this to hear, as a few days before Bishop Butler's
death he was walking in the garden with his chaplain, " I feel that
my feet are upon the Rock." This book seems to me altogether to
ignore belief, and to remove it as an intermediate from between
unbelief and hypocrisy. Wretched is man if these are the poles
between which he is doomed to waver. But I know that this is not so.
I knew scores oi dissenters {the old fashioned ones) who, in the literal
sense, believed the Bible narrative x and I hope there are many
Church people who do so, notwithstanding their sleek living,
and frequent " hops," and midnight soir/es, and worldly conformity,
tending to interpose a somewhat thick veil on the hither side of the
objects of faith. I dislike what is called ritualism, because it offers
to such silver-slippered Christians a substitute so specious for real
devotion, in outward prostrations, rote prayers, and the like ; but odd
things are to be found in odd corners at all times — Nicholas Farrers,
Edmund Laws, &c. ; and amid the very whirl of business, himself in
servile employment, had we not very lately Thomas Wright of
Manchester, whose " name is like a civet-box " ?
Your reason for public catechising, as to its indirect effect on
the parents, strikes me much. How powerful is indirect influence
for good or evil, and how widely may unsuspected consequences
spread, like the circles when a stone is thrown into the water, from
a single wholesome or indiscreet word !
0 ! that we might recall the idle words of our youth ; but they
are spoken for ever. . . .
1 How absurd it seems to be asserting such a palpable truistic fact : but really I
emerge from the book as from an exhausted receiver, thankful to remember that there are
and have been people surrounded with vital air and with lungs to make use of it 
IJ B

370 ..THE LETTERS OF
Mr. Ridsdale of Folkestone is going to disuse the vestments, &c,
for the present, having procured a command and DISPENSA
TION (! ! !) from Archbishop Tait. . . .
You are quite right about the warm colour of the young oaks.
Why should not clergymen inform themselves through their eyes
as well as through the ears : what are both, but gates of the under
standing. Why should a fine, antique statue be to the illiterate eyes
of a senior wrangler, as one said, merely a big, stone doll ? Simply
because at our universities the eyes are left untaught. A pastor
who had been taught to use his eyes might teach much to farm-
labourers from his poetic perceptions of farming. See Flavel (one
of the learned — the ejected Puritans), his Husbandry Spiritual
ized. . . . Yours affectionately, S. Palmer.

CVII. To the Rev. J. P. Wright.
July 17, 1877.
Dear Mr. Wright. As you invite criticism, I will suggest
that, however valuable your essay may be as author's material for
future use, it might possibly, in its present state, be misunderstood
by some readers, who would not always see whether you were in
jest or earnest. This, if it be true, is hardly your fault, for it is the
office of satire to guard men against the specious side of error by
exposing its ridiculous or shameful side. But what is satire to do
if Error prides herself upon her ridiculous side, and turns it
outwards ?
Spenser had to strip his " Duessa " ; but now-a-days " Duessa "
dances stark naked. If she, while you depict her filthiness displays
it for public approbation dull people will mistake you for one of
her admirers perhaps.
Progress, in the nature of things physical and moral, is never so
rapid as when it is down hill ; and such a race of this kind has been
run by really learned and accomplished people that Satire's
" occupation's gone " ; she must sit down exhausted and confess
herself beaten : she has been beaten with her own weapons, and can
transcribe only the absurdities which she would not have ventured
to imagine. Let us take a few at hap-hazard, all from great "lions,"
German, French, and English, abridged from memory.

SAMUEL PALMER. 371
Philosopher 1. " The Iliad is not a unity or work of art, but
"shreds of old songs quilted together into a scroll or book, after the
" savage natives had been taught to write."
Philosqpher 2. knows that the inferior animals are mere
automata, and rather thinks that Homer and Milton were
nothing more.
Philosopher 3. " So far from seeing any divine design in the
" human eye as an implement of sight, I would have returned
"upon his hands my optical instrument- maker's workmanship,
" if he had sent me such an one — a contrivance so clumsy."
Philosopher 4. " As to the arrangement of the solar system I
" think I could have improved upon it."
Philosopher the 5th is a benevolent sage who, regarding " more
in pity than in anger " the slow emancipation of thought, warns us
that " no country can be considered as really civilized in which we
may not go into the street and stab the first comer whenever a body
is wanted for scientific purposes."
Now people will hardly understand an essay in which such like
monstrosities are attacked with the mock gravity of satiric prose,
if they have heard them maintained in sober earnest, perhaps at
public lectures.
I should try in everything I wrote for the present age to excite
CURIOSITY. Secondly to give some story. Thirdly to move
some passion. Fourthly to create some surprise — treating the
British lions like children.
Were I an author, I should not venture into long essays, but
try to found everything, jest or earnest, upon some plot or story,
however simple. How much Gulliver's Travels gain by this. I
would not trust the public patience : people will have amusement,
and will not read twice to gather the meaning. The above may be
all a mistake. Pardon the invited freedom of, Yours affectionately,
Samuel Palmer.

CVIII. To Mr. F. G. Stephens.
Furze Hill, October 4, 1877.
Dear Mr. Stephens. I was reading to my wife The Athenmtm
critique on the Holkam Hall Claudes when she said, " Claude is so
beautiful that the very description of his pictures is music." B B 2

372 THE LETTERS OF
On this, I bethought me of the musician and how long it was
since I had heard of his welfare. If he and those most dear to him
are quite well, one line to say so, at any moment of leisure would
gratify, His very sincerely, S. Palmer.
P.S. Wild and vigorous as he was, I do not think that Salvator
was so supreme a master of landscape as Claude, though his
grandeur is of a kind more obvious to the many. It was a stand
ing puzzle to my old friend Mr. Varley, which he several times
expressed to me, t hat his lady pupils, one and all, thought Salvator
more sublime than Claude — Claude whose distinctive essence was
sublimity, in the estimation of no less a critic than Henry Fuseli.
But it is difficult to read your account of the pair of Salvators in
your " Sivinton [?] Park Collection" {A thenozum, September, 29)
without feeling a stimulus to i nvention ; and, having twice read it, I
discover that were the " conventionalities " omitted — that monster
tree and the like, there would be no stimulus whatever.
.... How well you describe the " purposes '' of Gaspar
Poussin and Salvator — the " conventional conditions." These con
ditions had become conventional because of an universal agreement
that they were conditions of the most excellent beauty.
What a treat awaits you at Farnley ! But I must repress the
baleful passion of envy 

1878
CIX. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
Furze Hill, March 4, 1878.
Dear Satirist. You know my tooth and have seat me a
bonbon. I was in the middle of a letter, but away it went,
and down I pounced upon my favourite Goldwin Smith, who
always knows what he means, and expresses what he knows. I
read aloud to the " head," and we agreed that there was as much
sense in a page as some of our literary gold-beaters would have
spread over twenty.
He ought not to have abused the facade of the National
Gallery ; to do so is to " go with the multitude to do evil." What
is Wilkins' own is wholly elegant ; all else was compulsory, and, I
believe broke his heart.

SAMUEL PALMER. 373
We have been at it again. Capital ! Capital ! Not a fuzzy
conception, not an obscure passage or phrase. Mr. Goldwin Smith
is a thorough modern, and would not have willingly spent a week
at "Cobweb Castle"1 ; but then he loves modernism on its truthful
side, as I hope we all do.
I read in The Athencsum of a fortnight back that the Quakers,
having become proprietors of their own nonconformist Campo
Santo and wishing to build over their ancestors' bones, have with
difficulty found workmen to grub up their remains, the place
having been for some years a pleasant garden ; that they have
rummaged the dust of John Bunyan ; torn up in gobbets what
fleshly remains there were of William Blake (William Blake was
buried by his own desire — will you call this a bull, I wonder — with
the rites of the Church of England), and hundreds of others ; got
them into a heap, soused them with carbolic acid, and then tumbled
them into a great pit in the corner.
Now this is just what I am sure Mr. G. S. would not sanction.
Nor would Aristotle call it magnanimous. When you have full
time, some day, please send me that passage.
Herbert has finished my head - ; an alter ego, if some may
be trusted who have seen it.
Our united much love, in this tiny space which is left for it, by
your too loquacious old friend, S. Palmer.
P.S. The Goldwin Smith scrawl I scribbled on the instant and
enveloped. I disenvelope it, as the " Friends '' have just dis-
enveloped William Blake, to add a yell on your news from Oxford.
Of course it is " scientific " to prefer a beverage chemically pre
pared with half a dozen deleterious compounds to your own
first-rate beer, brewed of malt and hops in your own college ; but
as to the library, the proposal you mention just pairs with the
Bunhill Fields exploit, as an outrage on the dead, with the addition
that it is a swindle on the living.
Modern exploits must be described in modern words— our old
language breaks down under them.
The proposal to tamper with Merton library implies a boundless
[l Mr. Wright, having heard from his boyhood all about " The Ancients," wrote a
parody of their strange doings and opinions, in which he made " Cobweb Castle ' their
head-quarters. The title was, I think, Nodes. — Ed.]
[2 The portrait at the beginning of this volume. — Ed.]

374 THE LETTERS OF
impudence ; but a three-syllable word is too rhythmical— too
grave, in fact, for a proposal which should be withered by some
slang monosyllable. What do you think of " cheek " ? I wish we
could add, " Don't you wish you may get it ? " But I fear they
will. Your college has money and ground : build a large room for
" useful" books by all means ; and a large laboratory (for chemistry
is a noble science) ; and, if needs be, a light, cheerful vivisection-
room for the amusement of the ladies, to alternate with the art
lectures elsewhere; but for decency's sake keep your hands off
your own books ; the hoofs of wild boars out of the vineyard of
your fathers.
When I read what you have told me, the old proverb rings in
my ears, " It is a villainous bird that fouls its own nest," and has
so rung ever since I first opened your letter.
I hope you have read the second article in January's Quarterly
on Scientific Lecturing. Prof: Virchow's speech you have doubt
less heard of. It seems that the very earliest fossil remains of man
are dead against the ape theory ....
Is there no monosyllable that fits the library affair ? Well, it's
A STENCH in the nostrils of S P, and should be yet more so
in yours.

CX. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, September 8, 1878.
My dear Mr. Valpy. With many thanks, I return your very
interesting notes, feeling almost as if I had enjoyed personally the
Veronese exploration. In Italian cities I think the English eye
enjoys physically a rest from right angles and perfectly straight
lines which harass it in every square rood of London buildings.
I remember, young as I was, presuming to demur to an
assertion of Mr. Blake's that our old cathedrals were not built to
rule and compass ; but I now see that, like many of his art state
ments, although literally a stretch or violation of truth it contained
or suggested a greater truth.
Moreover I am told that the corresponding sides or arches of
Winchester cathedral do not exactly correspond. It has been dis
covered that the apparently straight lines in the finest Grecian
architecture are really subtle curves ; and in the street architecture

SAMUEL PALMER. ,7S
of Rome we have a simple disregard of exactness ; for Mr.
Cockerell found that there was scarcely a house there at right
angles. Now I do not mean to assert that irregularity is beauty,
but merely that emancipation from rule and compass lines is a
visual comfort. Those columns we saw together from Diana's
Ephesian temple all looked as if they were hand and eye work.
1 suppose that art superimposed its charm upon the preparations
of arithmetic. What discovery is this — of another Assumption ? Have we
no prints of it, even in Messrs. Colnaghi's collection, or at the
Print Room ?
Henceforth, since, or I may say during the most profane and
barbaric demolition of the Wren churches, Englishmen of any
feeling or compunction must reckon themselves aliens, perhaps
intruders in their own country.
There are many exceptions, but an innate barbarism is a
national characteristic. We cannot be civilized beyond a certain
point : we should have relished another Russian war I We have
reason, however, for thankfulness that Christianity has done so
much to civilize and soften the heart, which is a greater thing than
any intellectual polish ; even if we might hope to rival the Athe
nian culture, for it left many of them sad rogues in other respects.
With our united kind regards, believe me, Yours most truly,
S. Palmer. 1879
CXI. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton. Furze Hill, Ftbruary 17, 1879.
My dear Mr. Hamerton  I have little doubt that you
have chosen for the best in using oil-colours for autotype : how
ever, if you find reason to change, water-colour has the one great
and weighty advantage of the pen line. Without its equivalent in
etching, I doubt whether Turner could have made his monochromes
so attractive. Line seems to me like the cymbals in a band, as the
dashes of shade are like the great drum : we scarcely miss the
colours where line pervades everything in its mysteries and its might.
The precision of its delicacy clears things up, like that tiny flute
which announces the melody, with no unpleasant shrillness, in a
full orchestra. But it is so important to use a material congenial

376 THE LETTERS OF
with the chemistry of autotype that I should be loth to change
what I found could be faithfully rendered.
Now as to your kind wish to see me at the etching once
more. Well ! My foot has slipped, and 1 have been for some
weeks neck deep in nitrous acid.
Four of the poor little Vs have been bitten and proved, and I
am just finishing two etchings almost the size of the Liber
Studiorum drawings, g.\ inches long. One plate, alas, by an old
compact is parted with ; the other, an essentially Palmerian affair, I
wish to keep in my family, and the amount it will realize by sale
of impressions will enable me to make some guess as to market
values. I am re-approaching etching not from the line-engraving
side, but wholly from the racy and picturesque ; yet it makes
havoc of my time, and I must shortly break off to finish long
standing commissions. Yet, if I live to finish them, I would
from that day forward refuse all future ones, were etching only
sufficiently remunerative.
The fact is that outline, with its local shadows, can be etched
rapidly ; not so that mystic maze of enticement ideal chiar
oscuro, of which I think you will agree with me that etching is the
best exponent. Mezzotint is the more obvious ; but, however well
done, it lies in some degree under the disadvantage so fatal to
oil-paintings, of a dark ground, by which the pictures of a whole
nation have been disfigured ere now. Like that cruel Othello, it
puts out the light and then puts out the light ; eclipsing the sun
before it closes the shutters. Though, with Ben Jonson's witches,
etching says to a shadow, here and there, " Deep, O deep, we lay
thee to sleep ; " yet, like those deepest of the deep yet clearest of
the clear early Flemish pictures, there is the virgin white of the
gesso ground behind. All this, however, you have expressed in
other and better words ; and I thank you much for having called
my attention to it : it influences the whole of my work. As to
reconcilement of interests, &c, I have a design ready for transference
to the copper (which probably will never be transferred), with the
advantage of essential brightness in its structure, and suited to the
increased size of my present work {a.\ inches) ; and, all being well,
upon the copper it might go, if I were guaranteed the price of a
certain number of impressions ; and just so my ten poor little Vs,
more deeply thought out than anything else I have done, might

SAMUEL PALMER. 377
see the light, if anyone would make a bid large enough to provide
beef during the remainder of the siege, while my private means
furnished the potatoes : but as my approaches, like " a death from
Spain," give a long reprieve, the rations of beef must be propor
tionate. Once more let me entreat you to see for yourself that your
autotypes have not those middle-tint mounts, which I should call,
from their destructive power, Satanic, but that I believe in, and
am experimentally certain of, the personal existence of Satan,
whose deepest artifice, it has been well said, is to infuse a doubt
into men's minds whether there is any Devil at all  Yours
most truly, S. PALMER.
CXI I. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
Red Hill, August 4, 1879.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. Pricked already with etching like
a full pincushion, your latter letter burst my side as with a packing-
needle ! How can I possibly touch copper again for eight months
to come, with drawings in hand which ought to have been sent
home years ago ? Etching, that wheedling hussy, like another
Millwood has already made me rob my long-suffering employers
of time which really belonged to them. It is true that I have not
yet, like my prototype, shot an uncle, neither have I eaten an aged
aunt like the Fejee Indians ; but there's no knowing.
Some have fancied themselves to be tea-pots ; others fragile
glass. What am I but a broken etching-needle with its wrong end
wedged into a paint-pot ? . . . .
It is my misfortune to work slowly, not from any wish to
niggle, but because I cannot otherwise get certain shimmerings of
light, and mysteries of shadow ; so that only a pretty good price
would yield journeyman's wages. Happily, I think I could realize
something more, in quarters to which I have myself access ; this
will perhaps soon be in some measure tested, as to what I have
already done, because there seems to be a lively demand 
I am very glad that you like my Bellman. ... It is a breaking
out of village-fever long after contact — a dream of that genuine
village where I mused away some of my best years, designing what
nobody would care for, and contracting, among good books, a fas-

378 THE LETTERS OF
tidious and unpopular taste. I had no room in my Bellman for
that translucent current, rich with trout, a river not unknown to
song ; nor for the so-called " idiot " on the bridge with whom I
always chatted— like to like perhaps. But there were all the
village appurtenances — the wise-woman behind the age, still
resorted to; the shoemaker always before it, such virtue is in the
smell of leather ; the rumbling mill, and haunted mansion in a
shadowy paddock, where sceptics had seen more than they could
account for ; the vicarage with its learned traditions ; and Words
worth brought to memory every three hours, by
' '  the crazy old church clock
And the bewilder'd chimes."
Byron would have stuffed his ears with cotton had he been forced
to live there.
I must again thank you for the pains you took to enlighten me
as to publication. I love calculation in the abstract — quite under
stand why Johnson put Cocker into his pocket to amuse him in
his travels, equations having been, off and on, my daily amusement
for some time, but when it comes to the concrete — oh then,
" Thy hand great " Dulness " lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness covers all."
With our united best regards, believe me to be, Ever faithfully
yours, S. PALMER. CXIII. To Mr. P. G. Hamerton.
Red Hill, October 13, 1879.
Dear Mr. Hamerton. Do not be alarmed. This is not one
of those scorpion letters which entail an answer, like my late
column of queries which you so kindly and so copiously answered.
Your advice has been taken, the etching has been published by
The Fine Art Society, and the poor Bellman is gazing out of the
window at the shops in Bond Street.
.... I have been reading with much interest your notes on
^Esthetics : in the last you are approaching the deep matters of
placing : placing of lines, of shadows, of colours. This art, under
the name of composition, is probably despised by the naturalistic
school. Yet what is composition but the art of placing things
naturally ; a result, however simple, of most subtle knowledge

SAMUEL PALMER. i7u
acquired in the course of a life-long comparison of nature with art?
If the lights and shades are finely disposed, as in Tintorct, for
instance, the work, irrespectively of subject, will gratify the eye,
turn it upside down, or whichever wa)' you will. I have often
wondered whether such men could define in wonls the Grand
Specific, or give us more than the few golden traditions which they
have left, such, for instance, as " Few lights, many shadows,
much middle-tint."
Surely you have an acquisition in Mr. T. S. Townsend : I find
myself recurring to his Gothic Tower [an etching in The Portfolio!]
I may be quite wrong but it seems to me no small thing to
achieve aerial gloom with a needle point, and to discriminate the
qualities of light and shade ; avoiding in the latter the besetting
errors of rattle and texture. I judge from only a single impres
sion, and know not how much is retroussage ; but, with such feel
ing, there must surely be some amount of inventive power, which
perhaps may be inherited, if he be a son of our poet-etcher whose
" shadowy flail " in The Etching Club I! Allegro can never be
forgotten. . . .
.... But surely you do too much for your health, and so
many things ? Variety is refreshing, but multiplicity may over
whelm. This is not said in malicious envy ; though perhaps if,
like St. Martin, you could bestow upon me a moiety of your
multiplicity-mantle it might do no harm to cither of us.
It does sadden me not to have touched a needle since Mr.
Bellman's suit was stitched together, nor to have any chance of
doing so for some time to come. Some of my large drawings,
long since due, seem jealous of the poor, harmless coppers in the
cupboard, and determined never to get finished. Then there are
new commissions ; but if I once get free and have my present
reasons for thankfulness as to health, then welcome once more
dear, teazing, tickling coppers ; may we never part again till the
great change come when ^Esthetics and the Intellectual will be of
little moment, and the MORAL all in all.
I am glad that, in the outset of your essays, you have so
distinctly separated the three ; for I fear there is many an ardent
art-student who is likely to make Art his Gospel. If half-educated,
the more likely to mistake analogy for identity, the analogies of
religion and ideal art being copious indeed. It is by a most un-

380 THE LETTERS OF
natural disseverance, in this our fallen state, that truth and beauty,
wisdom and goodness, do not always co-exist. By and bye they
will, but, meanwhile, a murderer whose name need not be per
petuated having prepared a poisoned supper for his sister-in-law,
whose life he had insured, went forth with his paint-box and
sketched a fine sunset from Waterloo Bridge.
On the other hand some of the greatest men and greatest
artists have been good. Among the moderns the greatest of
the great was converted by his friendship with Vittoria Colonna.
Please give our kindest regards to Mrs. Hamerton, whose
image, with your own, is often recalled. My mind, so much or
little of it as is left, walks frequently in your neighbourhood, and
sometimes takes a header into the trout-stream at the end of your
garden. Always curious to guess what you are engaged upon, and
hoping that you will not catch many colds in a studio which I
think you proposed building in your garden  Believe me,
Ever sincerely yours, S. PALMER.

CXIV. To the Rev. J. P. Wright.
Furze Hill, October 17, 1879.
Dear Mr. Wright. Men, rats, and pike are distinguished in
natural history by their propensity to prey upon their own kind.
The " rights of man " are the right of the less voracious to restrain
those who are more so ; the rights of the poor majority are pure
air and pure water, and sufficient space to walk about in, when the
rich minority are befouling the air with manufactories, poisoning
the rivers, and, as in the neighbourhood of Foots Cray and St.
Mary's, adding "field to field, till there be no place" left, and
the villagers cannot step out of the dusty high-road without a
trespass. The rich and the middle classes for ages befouled the air by
retiring into their coffins beneath churches which were frequented
by all classes ; and when, by an agony of accommodation, I was
trying to please our " learned friend " [Mr. T. IT. Wright, now a
barrister,] by naming some instance in my own time of un
doubted progress, fortunately, I thought of the abolition of
intermural interments.

SAMUEL P A LMER. 381
This is an advance, but I think our dear, cheerful, peace-loving
Virgil says in the Gcorgics that " all things are always tending to
the worse," and that in trying to row upward against the stream
we may be tumbled all over back again by remitting one stroke of
the oar.
Cleanliness is active, dirt passive. Fallen nature, therefore,
which among other things is idle, prefers dirt ; not indeed with
that passionate preference which makes a washed lapdog roll
himself in the first filth, but with the quiet, inevitable habits of
"heredity" — the first time I ever used the word. So that your
travail and warfare, hard as it seems, is really a bright exception
to the usual somnolency of boards and committees ; which latter
are best composed of a couple — a seer and a doer, or " two single
gentlemen rolled into one " (Colman's Broad Grins — a curious
book to quote from !), and less and less effectual in proportion to
the number. . . .
I am very glad, and ver)- sorry — glad that Mrs. John is so much
better ; sorry to lose dear friends at St. David's. Hoping to have
at last one more talk with you ere long, and with my wife's love,
who means to write, and lamenting that, according to the article,
the poor Club, during forty years, did nothing for etching, I remain,
having another letter to write against time, Yours affectionately,
S. Palmer. CXV. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
Furze Hill, October, 1879.
My dear Mr. Wright (I can't "Tom " or "Jack" an Oxford
Don, can I ?) x Here's a bad style, beginning with a parenthesis !
Well ! Mr. Williams lived at 104. 2 Ask to see Sir James Thorn-
hill's allegorical staircase. Excellent was its condition in 1829. I
never saw it. It was at 96 that Mrs. Powel for many years made
her pipe of wine from the grapes which grew in her garden. I
never saw it. What of that ? — other people saw it, and their eyes
are as good as mine. There are two sorts of people ; those who
believe on evidence ; and those who, in their omniscience, make a
P Our friend, having known my father since his childhood, objected to being called
" Mr. Wright," a formality adopted by his correspondent after his becoming a Fellow of
Merton.— Ed.]
P I believe this refers to St. Martin's Lane.— Ed.]

382 THE LETTERS OF
list of the impossibles, and believe, even on the strongest evidence,
only such things as their expurgatory index has left open. Even
Mr. Huxley says that the word impossible is impossible with a
philosopher. I said the other day trying to illustrate an uncouth absurdity,
that it was like " blotting-paper sandwiches, pensive cheese, or
grated consciousness " : but, after sending off the letter, I re
membered that there were few indeed who, at one time or other,
had not known the flavour of grated consciousness.
Now my poor consciousness is sadly grated when that same
infallible list rubs against it.
That bag of impossibles is a big one by this time : curious
matters tumble out when you shake it ; poor dear Homer among
the first. Now what is meant by saying that Homer did not write
the Iliad is this ; that no man wrote the Iliad — in fact that it
"developed" : that it was self-developed out of fragments.
But it is as impossible that a first-rate poem or work of art
should be produced without a great master mind, which first con
ceives the whole, as that a fine, living bull should be " developed "
out of beef sausages.
If I could call the most august authorities to give judgment
they would be unanimous.
It would be cruel to call Homer, as he would be " Burked," i.e.
critic'd, in the street. Well, these might suffice.
Virgil, Milton, Dante, Michael Angelo, Blake. All, in every age,
who had made the article would testify that an idea of the whole was
indispensable to the adjustment of the parts.
If, on the other hand, the Iliad be not a work of art, all the
world has been drivelling for three thousand years, or thereabouts.
.... Yours affectionately, S. PALMER.

CXVI. To Miss Louisa Twining.
Furze Hill House, November 18, 1879.
Dear Miss Twining. You asked me why I had never written
what I said to you about St. Paul's. I have just been invited to a
meeting about St. Mark's at Venice which reminded me of a peril
so much nearer home.

SAMUEL PALMER. 383
There is a fund, amounting, I am told, to no less than fifty
thousand pounds, for what is called the " completion " of St. Paul's.
There are also the echoes of Sir Gilbert Scott's three words ol
wisdom— "LET IT ALONE!" But dilettanti with half a plum
in their pocket will let nothing alone, and these "completers" 01
St. Paul's are particularly attracted by the cupola, as giving the
widest scope for their fancies and experiments.
Sir Christopher, having kept the deeply-set windows of that
sloping wall between the dome and the Whispering Gallery narrow
— so nicely dispensing the " dim religious light " as to leave the
cupola in a sort of poetic mystery, mosaics were proposed, not
long ago, to make the dome more cheerful, and metallic reflectors
to brighten the mosaics ! The slope of the pilasters is continued
upwards, at present, by the architectural divisions in the chiaroscuro
of Sir James Thornhill, so that the eye does not detect the artificial
perspective ; but directly the chiaroscuro is removed, and horizontal
layers of any kind substituted, the secret will out ; the dome will
seem to be fifty feet lower, and the wall which supports it about
to topple upon the spectator.
Perhaps in all literature a single word was never made to tell
more effectively than the " circumspice " in Wren's epitaph, which
was composed with a view to its proper place in the cathedral, but
is futile in its present position; for who can "look around" him
when he is against a wall ?
If, however, the gentlemen of the committee once begin to
manipulate that peerless cupola, the most sublime though not the
largest in Europe, we shall not desire to look around us any longer,
but shall exclaim with Fuseli, when a fellow-traveller in the stage
coach mentioned that his daughter painted on velvet : — " Let me
get out ! — Let me get out ! "
Wren insisted on such nicety of proportion, even on that vast
scale, that I believe he refused Father Smith an additional seven
inches in the width of the organ-case.
Now, in their own sacred profession, the Dean and Chapter of
St. Paul's reverence the symmetry of Truth, and know the peril of
an illiterate and slapdash theology. Surely, as members of the
completion committee, they must have noticed something analogous
in the lower, though not low, region of aesthetics 
Believe me, with our united best regards, Yours very truly,
Samuel Palmer.

384 THE LETTERS OF
CXVII. To Mr. W. Williams.
[The younger son of my father's old friend, Dr. Williams. — Ed.]
Red Hill, December 26, 1879.
Dear Mr. Williams. This is Boxing-day : kindly accept
six words: DO THE MOST DISAGREEABLE THING
FIRST — pantomimic words, transformable into competency, free
dom, and fine weather in the conscience : useless five years hence,
for then the Habits will have been formed, and habit, as The Duke
said, is not second nature but " ten times nature." You see I set
the example of doing the disagreeable first, namely giving advice ;
and so proceed unencumbered to less nauseous though melancholy
matters of the confession that, yesterday, I strangely omitted to
read, as was my wont, Milton's Ode on the Nativity, and the con
fession that I have not learned by heart Paradise Regained ; " a
charming poem," says Bishop Warburton, " nothing inferior to
Paradise Lost."
As to advice, am I so inexperienced as to suppose that any one
will take it ? Well, there is just the millionth part of a chance, and
at all events I have washed my conscience.
As matter of fact, I have, during a pretty long life, taken advice
two or three times, and with advantages which abide with me to
this day. When very young I did not consider the hours between
breakfast and dinner sacred to work ; to education, with a student
until he graduates ; to his profession or business, with man settled
in life. Now when about eighteen, I gave some little part of the sacred
daylight to music ; but a friend, only a little older than myself,
warned me, and I instantly left an amateur musical society, and
thereafter sang or fiddled only in the evening.
"In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread," is, as Burke has
somewhere beautifully shown, a dispensation of mercy in our fallen
state ; and surely afternoon and evening are long enough for our
exercise and recreation. With you and me choice books are the
favourite amusement, but woe betide us if we are indulging our
taste when we ought to be doing our work. How well Buonaparte
knew the value of time ! He said of some of his Marshals, " They
do not know the value of MINUTES."
Much may be learned of him ; much also of the Devil, who
watches opportunities, and makes opportunities. . . .

SA M UE L PA L ME R. 385
You may read of Thomas Wright, to whom I alluded in my
last, by getting Smiles's Self Help. I read it once, and think we
should all read it twice. It helps much to explain what you were
inquiring after, the nature of greatness.
Before we quite dismiss Buonaparte, I may mention that a
gentleman who had conversed with him at St. Helena told me
that when he otherwise smiled his eyes never smiled. Much may
be learned of him. " KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO
AND DO IT," said Mr. Mulready. This was Buonaparte's way,
and had he been king of England, and absolute, many things would
have been done in a year or so which we have been half a century
fumbling after.
He never PROCRASTINATED I think until his fatal morn
ing of Waterloo. Satan also is a most wonderful person, and
it will be the worse for us Christians if we underrate the stupendous
compass of his intellect and energy. I suppose, if the truth must
be told, that he is the " natural man's " favourite hero ; and no
wonder, for is he not the " god of this world " ? 
In answer to your question, I think that if Swift (as I believe
he did) wrote The Tale of a Tub, it must take rank next to
Gulliver. With objectionable matter, it contains the most pun
gent satire on popery I ever met with. Through other parts Swift
lost a bishopric.
There was so much dirt in the writings of one or two of these
gentlemen, that I should fear there was still more in their con
versation : not so in Bishop Berkeley's, I think ; to whom Pope as
signs " every virtue under Heaven." Walpole is said to have de
tained thirty thousand pounds from Berkeley's American Mission.
Much as I admire Queen Anne's Wits, I cannot venerate
them as I venerate the pre-Restoration men. When your age I
read the very men you are reading, and learned from the satirists
to despise folly and vice. Some years after I found in the seven
teenth century matter to admire and imitate, sanctity, and ideal
beauty. Yours &c., S. Palmer.
CXVIII. To Mr. W. Williams.
Red Hill, [1879.]
My dear Mr. Williams. I rather think that Burke admired
Ximenes for'his goodness even more than for his greatness, so far
c c

386 THE LETTERS OF
as I could gather from that after-dinner talk ; and it is owing to a
dreadful twist, a sprain of the perceptions, if we do not admire
goodness more than greatness.
What a vulgar scoundrel was Buonaparte x — what a butcher,
what a brute, compared with Thomas Wright the clerk and
warehouse-man at Manchester.
I make it a rule to write or speak evil of no one, but there are
exceptions, and they are said to manifest the rule. When we are
not comparing Napoleon with Thomas Wright, or with the martyrs,
we can admire his misdirected genius, the Greek chiselling of his
features, his aquiline eye, and electric movements. . . .
Miss Burney's day at Sir Joshua's Richmond villa was pleasant
reading ; much more so than her novels. I think I met with it in
Lord Minto's life. How Burke rejoiced in Lord Minto's successful
speech when he was only M.P.! ....
As to " great men's greatness," from what I have seen, heard,
or read, they seem to be distinguished from other men by their
energy, patience, and accuracy.
Accuracy of itself is not greatness, but as essential to it as the
air we breathe is essential to life. I have observed that in
proportion as men approach greatness they are observant of little
things, that they do not think much about themselves, but are
absorbed in their great aim, whatever it may be ; and that the
motive spring of energy is devotion to that aim, and not at all that
they may be called or thought to be great men.
The greatest man it has been my lot to know insisted most on
our becoming like little children. Newton compared himself to a
child trying to collect a few shells, or pebbles.
Some one says ''Patience is genius:" If a genius could be
made, he would be made by the words, " Whatever you do, give
your whole mind to it."
A great man told me that all work, inventive or otherwise,
was equally pleasant to him. Dickens says, writing to his son
Henry, " I should never have made my success in life if I had not
bestowed upon the least thing I have ever undertaken the same
attention and care that I have bestowed upon the greatest."
Dickens's Letters.
1 "Nothing was more debased than his soul." See Athenceitm, November 22, 1879,
page 653. Middle of the 3rd column.

S AMUEL PA L ME R. 387
Most of the great men have had bodies strong in endurance if
not in muscle ; most have been early risers. None, that I know
of, have begun to see things "dreadfully clear" at eleven at
night, and have then brewed gunpowder tea, or strong coffee !
I would strongly advise young men to adopt a wise regimen of
diet and exercise, with a view to that wondrous blessing a sound
body.1 Your mention of our individuality, our essence, almost makes
me tremble ; for mine must, in the course of nature, soon be called
away to give an account of the things done in the body, whether
good or bad ; — the things which IT has done through the body as
its instrument. Can we wonder that Kant never thought with
out awe of the starry heavens, or of our moral responsibility ?
Sometimes I cannot write for weeks together, so please do not feel
hurt if I postpone at an)- time. With our united love to your dear
father and mother, sister and brethren, believe me to be Yours
faithfully, S. Palmer. 1880
CXIX. To Mr. W. Williams.
Red Hill, July 20, 1880.
Dear Mr. Williams. Although generally in agreement
with your letter I will mention, merely as a fact, that the French
peasantry are in much better circumstances than before the
Revolution. This however is no result of atheism, but of a more
equitable distribution of property, and deliverance from unbearable
oppression. With ourselves, neither principles nor practice are satisfactory :
where there is no belief there will be no conscience ; and those
who know best speak the most sadly of our dishonest speculations,
our fraudulent commerce, and an export of " Devil's dust," loaded
silks, wooden nutmegs,2 and the like, which have sent and are
sending our foreign customers elsewhere.
Political reform has done so little to make us better that the
1 See Lord Bacon on this subject in his Essay. [Of Regimen of Health.— Ed.]
[2 The people of Connecticut have been credited with such astuteness that it has been
called " The Nutmeg State " on account of their supposed capability of passing off
wooden nutmegs. Webster's Dictionary. — Ed.] C C 2

388 THE LETTERS OF
old maxim which the liberals used to laugh at so much, " Let each
reform himself," seems respectable advice after all. As to the
blessing of liberty depending upon the character of the free, no
one has spoken more strongly than John Stuart Mill.
Who does not love to see animals disporting at large ? Yet we
do not open the cages at the Zoological Gardens. My hope for
our country lies not in our wealth and enterprise but in His mercy
who would have spared the guilty city for ten's sake.
Every young Christian who has " conquered the natural man,"
and, being strong by the indwelling Spirit, has " overcome the
wicked one," is, in result, the wisest politician, the best citizen, and
defender of his country. Can we name a hero more noble than
the youthful warrior whose armour shows many a dint and bruise
of that most terrible contest, the warfare with himself, and of
the victory ? For him alone remains a manhood and serene age
"  whose course is equable and pure,
No fears to beat away, no strife to heal,
The past unsigh'dfor and the future sure."
I never saw the St. Paul's sermons, but should expect much
from the author of Fundamentals ; which, I think, would have had
a wide sale with a wise public. I wish you had time and eyesight
(for the type is bad) to read an eighteen-penny book, the Rev.
Joseph Cook's Boston Monday Lecture on Life and the Soul. His
aim is to show that the exactest science and logic are not only not
at variance with Divine Revelation, but must result in its accept
ance. Talking of type, may I recommend you to write larger,
with good broad letters, so much insisted on by Lord Palmerston ?
It is only near-sighted persons like myself who can read small
writing without pain. Of course you never cross-write — that is
felony !
Bear in mind Mr. Cook's lecture, and with our united love to
all, believe me, Yours faithfully, S. Palmer.

CXX. To Mr. C. W. Cope.
Red Hill, July 27, 1880.
My dear Cope. Many thanks for the Milton, a model of
condensation. This makes the sixth life of him which I remember
to have read. Others are probably forgotten. Each was a whet

5 A M UE L PA L ME R. 389
for the next. Masson's I have not time for. No one treats
Johnson quite fairly. What could he say more than that Milton's
epic is even finer than Homer's ? This is implied in saying that
the Paradise Lost "is not the greatest of heroic poems, only
because it is not the first." Johnson's Lives.
Johnson was not touched by Lycidas because he had a defective
sense of the essence of poetry, though a sagacious judge of its
machinery and concomitants. Over and over again have I read
Gray's Eton College with Johnson's critique in my mind ; yet I still
love it, and cannot persuade myself that it is more specked and
flawed than many charming things. I have heard that difficult
passage in L' Allegro, " Then to come in spite of sorrow " &c,
thoroughly discussed ; and certainly Mr. Pattison is right as to the
grammatical meaning ; but that Milton's was the other, and that,
for a wonder, he expressed himself ungrammatically I finally
believe. Milton's notion that "one tongue was enough for a woman "
hardly accounts for the general neglect of his daughter's education,
when he was living close to Whitehall, and in a social position not
inferior to that of Sir Arthur Helps or the like. Neither Milton
nor Scott, nor a greater than Scott, dear Edmund Burke, founded
a family. Milton's ended with his grand-daughter, who kept a
chandler's shop, and for whose benefit Comus was performed ; and
Sir Walter's is already extinct. His last relative died about a year
since in a Kentish parsonage : Keston I think.
Mr. Pattison clearly perceives that Milton's descriptions are not
scientifically accurate. It seems that poetic perfection and feeling
are passive. Pindar's Eagle is passive under the influence of
music ; he does not count the aerial vibrations. Perception looks
at the front of a picture ; " Science " begins with the back, and by
the "Method of Zadig " (see Nineteenth Century for June)
discovers in Thomas Brown of 163, High Holborn, a marvel of
versatility and productiveness, compared with whom Shakespeare
was a mannerist and Michelangelo an idler.
Before Herbert was strong enough to use his press it went to
London to be altered ; and is now like all things else, including the
British Constitution, under considerable alteration ; but he will see
to the burr if there be any, and forward the plates to Mr. Goulding,
who was his printing-tutor.

390 THE LETTERS OF
Our " spring cleaning " this time has been unspeakable. Hall
and drawing-room wholly covered with a better carpet than
Brussels — namely Wilton — price altogether something short of
£4oM We can only reconcile ourselves to these awful wash-ups by
remembering the opposite alternative ; two villages seen by
Captain Burnaby in Asia Minor, wholly possessed by fleas ; the
inhabitants, fairly beaten, living in tents at some distance.
A medical cousin of mine at Coggeshall, Essex, found a patient
watching at his window for hearses, and longing for his turn to come.
" O ! Mr. Giles," he said, " I have married a cleanly woman ! ! ! If
I sit down in this room it is about to be swept ; in the next — it is
to be scoured ; in a third they are taking up the carpets ; there is
no rest for the sole of my foot." 
With our united best regards to yourself and Mrs. Cope, who I
hope has not forgotten poor me altogether, I remain, Yours
affectionately, S. Palmer.
CXXI. To Mr. J. C. Hook. .
Red Hill, August 13, 1880.
My dear Hook. Welcome back to the " spongy South " with
all its lassitudes. With us there came with the new moon a change
to dry weather, of which I once had three weeks in Cornwall.
I was much interested by your remarks on that difficult subject,
publication. As those who are not rich can only obtain works of
art in the shape of engravings and etchings, might there not be a
reserve for them after the richer people have got their remarque
proofs, &c. ?
Cutting the plate so as to make the margin a little narrower
would be an unmistakable guarantee of genuine proofs to the
holders of them. There is no doubt as to what are early proofs of
the old etchings and engravings, yet they are said to have been
afterwards quite hackneyed in the book-markets, and even printed
in the streets ; and so hundreds of young artists have borne home
half-crown's-worths of invaluable suggestion from the trays of the
old London print-sellers. And to many of them a guinea is now
not more than a couple of shillings were then. If the plate-
destroying system had then obtained, Marc Antonio, Bonasoni,

SAMUEL PA L ME R. 3g ,
and the like, could have been seen only now and then in the
museums. In one of my Club works there is bound up one of those
ghastly sights, an etching in an excellent state, all ploughed over.
To me it gives real pain ; seeming like the murder of a mind. It
seems to me like trying to increase the zest of a banquet by
assuring the guests that all they leave will be destroyed, neither
servants nor poor neighbours being suffered to taste it.
Excuse me for diverting, for a moment, your attention from Tol
Pedn Penwith, Treen Castle &c, and with kindest regards from all
to all, believe me, Yours affectionately, S. Palmer.

CXXII. To Mr. W. Williams. Red Hill, August, 1880.
Dear Mr. Williams. What has the creature of an hour to do
with "tlie whole range of philosophy" — with the wisdom, and folly,
and confusion, and vagaries, alternating through a compass of three
thousand years — when he has only just time enough to master the
elements of education, to learn a profession or business, and to save
his soul ? These things make me sick ! What can he want more
than just enough geometry to flush the sewers of his brain, Aris
totle to teach him how to think, the sacred Scriptures to direct
his thoughts, and the indwelling Spirit of God to quicken these
thoughts into action ? Milton's Tractate is the ideal of education,
and if people were twice as wise and good as they are it might be
practicable. He says himself, " it is not a bow for every man
to shoot with who counts himself a teacher."
I strongly recommend you to read this, and his Areopagitica.
You have hitherto enjoyed what, in rough distinction, may be
called our colloquial literature, or rather our colloquial style ; and
I think you might now take a step of advance to the heroic,
particularly to Hooker, who will make a man of any one who
absorbs him.
I can never forget reading through Barrow's folio on the Creed
in the recess of a Kentish village ; and, by the bye, it is curious
that the step from the strenuous to the more colloquial style is
distinctly marked in the transition from Barrow to his friend Tillot-
son, who published Barrow's works. And Tillotson is no less a

392 THE LETTERS OF
prose writer than the same on whom Dryden professes to have
founded his style.
The fearful depravity you mention may be blessed to the
children of God, by frightening them into a close shelter beneath
the Almighty wings. Life is short to all of us, and it is well to
lose no more of it in halting between two opinions.
When we have read how men were given over to a reprobate
mind, because "they did not like to retain God in their know
ledge," let us turn, as from a noisome cesspool, to the twelfth of
Romans, and find there an universe of blessing cheaply purchased
by the loss of a right hand or eye. In the kindly fruits of the
earth, in physical and mental pleasures, God has given more than
sufficient to solace and sustain us, while we daily present ourselves
living sacrifices to His service, in the whole of our moral being, in
the bent and intention of our lives.
In everything it holds good : no sacrifice, no success ; no cross,
no crown. This " living " is no annihilation, no mystification, but
a quickening of every faculty by the touch of a living coal from
the altar ! Away then goes the " ME " ; Pascal's " me," which he
regards as the pest of the moral universe. Yet there is no loss of
individual character ; on the contrary, each temperament becomes
more distinct by receiving that particular spiritual gift which it is
best fitted to sustain. Where is individuality more evident than
in ecclesiastical history ; in the saints, missionaries, champions,
poets, and sages of the Church ; in an Augustine, a Boniface, an
A'Becket, a Fenelon, an Anselm, a King, or Butler ? For I think
we may regard Telemachus as a Christian prose-poem in a pagan
binding. Do stick to your large writing, and keep your letters broad :
oblige yourself to preserve the loops in the Es ; which I do not
always myself. With love from all to all, believe me Yours
faithfully, S. PALMER.
CXXIII. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
Furze Hill, November 17, 1880.
My DEAR Howard. " Dis is vonders above vonders," as the
Dutchman said, when, after visiting the " learned pig," he took
his seat in the " Reading fly," and waited for the performance.

SAMUEL PA L M E R. 393
I read some time ago about the audible shadow, neither gulping
nor gainsaying, and supposed it to be the ne plus ultra , but must
now consider it as one of the slopes of an ascent, on the very
summit of which you yourself stand illustrious. Proceeding by the
method of climax, I think the keeping of tame adders ranks above
it ; next the continuing to keep them after being bitten ; and then,
" with a great interval," the triumph of wonders in your belief in
the harmlessness of that animal. Now, my dear friend, we arc
quits: alated snakes and injurious effets kick the beam J1 In this
happy thaw of incredulity wc may extend our inquiries in the
direction of those dog-headed men without necks, and with long
hair hanging down behind, " who, as a cacique told Raleigh, had of
late years slain many hundreds of his father's people, and in whom
even Humboldt was not always allowed to disbelieve."
Now that we can hear a shadow we shall soon be able to see a
sound. We shall hold up a telephonic bottle of parliamentary or
forensic orator)-, and see through it in a moment — the last thing
intended by the speakers.
Who now will dare to question the continuity of progress, or
waste a thought on such trifles as Ireland, Eastern Europe, Indian
famines, famished peasantries, and monster armaments ?
" Ye feather* d songster Chanticleer
Han wounde his bugle home,
An told the early villager
Ye coming of the morn."
" Stranger."2 " It is not the chanticleer, it is the Cameron "3 —
and thus he crows : —
" If we consider the number of centuries that it took to produce
the literature and art of the Greek nation we shall see that far more
stupendous works are undertaken, more beautiful pictures are painted,
more literature worthy of abiding to the latest time is written in
one year in England in the Victorian era, than was ever the case in
the days of ancient Greece."
In my phenomenal investigations I observed that the light
in the sky for some time before sunrise increased by sudden
yet gentle flushes. So it is with the great intellectual sunrise
[' This refers to the Shoreham stories I have alluded to previously.— Ed.]
p One of the characters in Mr. Wright's Nodes. See p. 373.— Ed.]
3 In Our Fultire High-way, 1880. You see we are up in the newest !

394 THE LETTERS OF
which we are now, every mother ape's son of us, agog to
witness. " Things is coming to a crcesus," as Winifred Jenkins says.
Every one has his question, and demands an answer and forgets
what he asked.1
" — 0, qui me .... sistat" in the quietude of Maignan's cell
whence the persuasions of monarchy could not remove him. " He
is said to have studied even in his sleep, dreaming of theorems the
demonstrations of which would awaken him with joy."
In a sphere more exalted, shines your western namesake ; a
star of the MORAL FIRMAMENT. You would not marvel at
the words " Dear Mr. Wright " if you knew how dear they were to
me ; recalling the ever-cherished memory of your father, and of
Thomas Wright of Manchester, at the utterance of whose name
angels touch their harps.
Some day, when quite at leisure, tell me something about your
self ; also whether you have yet discovered the Chancery Court, and
believe me to be, Affectionately yours, A Suckling at THE
Bosom of Truth.

CXXIV. To Mr. T. H. Wright.
[Red Hill] December 21, 1880.
My dear Howard. I shall be delighted to see you, and mean
while wish you every blessing of the approaching season, and of the
new year ; hoping for the sake of my fellow creatures that this may
be the last Christmas of the present dispensation.
Social relations have long been a sad sight, but now they are a
great STENCH.
What combinations of the burnt oil of the steam-engine with
soap-lees, carts and many cart-loads of mangled human meat from
city churchyards, could revolt us like the aggregate of modern pro
gress ? Think of the swine who have rent, ravaged, and defiled the
books and parchments of thirty-seven " valuable libraries " of which
they have plundered so many monasteries in Italy — Italy the land
of Cicero and Virgil ! " Uncounted thousands of volumes have
P Here follows a passage quaintly erased and curiously blotted, with words as follows
in the margin. "If Ben Jonson says that Shakespeare ought to have blotted a thousand
lines I ought to blot everything. Please accept this little instalment. Some would
pologize ! ! ! ! "—Ed.]

SAMUEL PALMER. 3<;5
disappeared, no one knows how." " Eleven thousand kilogrammes
of books were sold as waste-paper at from three to eight sous the
kilogramme. A cheesemonger had man)- works of great rarity, in
cluding even parchments, and that celebrated and very scarce book
' Ilprocesso degli Untori di Milano! . . . But these are only a few of
the astounding facts," &c. &c. &c.
See The Times weekly edition for December 17, page 2.
I always thought the English language copious and forcible,
though marred in its sound by the consonants and the ever-hissing
S ; but it has suddenly become poor in vituperative power when it
attempts to characterize combinations of sacrilege, felony, ultra-bar
baric outrage, wanton waste, and crushing taxation, with which
" the march of mind " is blasting the fairest regions of the earth.
I suppose, when " Liberalism " is yet a little more advanced,
the above will be hanging matter, so I will sign myself Yours
affectionately, A blind Baby feeding from the Bosom of
Truth.

1881
CXXV. To Mr. L. R. Valpy.
Red Hill, Posted February 16, 1881.
Dear Mr. Valpy. It is cheering to hear of the safety of one's
friends after the late frost ; during the snow, I was advised to keep
to my bed (sitting up in it to work), and my room in the severe
cold. Coming forth at last I got out Tlie Eastern Gate, and was
busy upon it when your letter arrived this morning. I am anxious
to do my all for it, whatever that may be, as it seems to have
impressed several persons more than anything I have done. Thank
you for the information about the two frames. I think it would be
better to send two than three large drawings to our Spring Exhibi
tion ; but I wish to bring all to a close.
I do not know how to describe that which is in the Winter
Exhibition otherwise than the rush of a flock, just let out of the fold,
upwards towards the eye, with a ravine behind and distant
mountains : it is nearly the same as the etching now in the hands
of the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street.
I wish, with you, that " brightness with some sense of beauty '•
might more often cheer the walls both of houses and public institu-

396 THE LETTERS OF
tions ; but apprehend that beauty of form must come before bright
ness ; and that beauty can come only from the Beautiful. Now
putting aside moral beauty, " the beauty of holiness," the English
are not a beautiful people as those sad rogues the Athenians were
beautiful.* Some of the best people we know and the most benevo
lent of both sexes are quite void of taste, and would rather have a
bit of still life, or a chromolithograph, than Raffaelle's Vision of
Ezekiel ; and it is to the next generation that we must look for
improvement, if we look for it at all.
The one thing, I think, is to improve the taste of the young by
surrounding them from infancy with beautiful objects. With this
view, for our National Schools &c, Mr. Gruner, forty years ago,
published both versions of Raffaelle's Bible History, in the Vatican.
But where were they hung up ? Now there is a plethora of beauty
waiting to be hung up in our schools and nurseries, in the autotype
establishment in Oxford Street : but where are the school-masters,
clergy, district-visitors, &c., who would not prefer a kitten in colours ?
And I fear you would be terrified at the colours placed upon the
walls as you propose.
But though we are not a beautiful people, but very ugly-
minded as to form, we like colour of a certain kind very much.
When Mr. Rogers the poet was showing me his pictures, he said
that the universal voice of his visitors was for the Rubens over his
dining-room fire-place ; and that, because of the colour. Now
these were some of the most clever people about town : though the
choicer eyes prefer Titian.
Well, let our nurseries, school-rooms, &c, public and private, be
hung with the Oxford Street autotypes of the Sistine Chapel ; that
will help to expand our ugly minds from infancy upwards, if they
will expand without cracking. But three hundred years ago,
foreigners remarked that we were a war-loving, semi-barbarous
people : no less barbarous now perhaps, if we have become a
money-loving, " peace-at-any-price " people. We suffered the Poles
to fight themselves out, and the Danes, and the Circassians, and
need not expect pity when our turn comes.
Many thanks for a sight of Mr. Ruskin's address. I am read
ing his Letters, which like all his works which relate to political
economy and national policy seem to be very weighty. His Unto
This Last is a grand book though a little one.

SAMUEL PALMER. 397
February 15. After four days' work on The Eastern Gate, is it
framed removably, and put up for occasional inspection ; and to-day
has been spent upon The Prospect. Believe me, with our united
kindest regards, Ever yours sincerely, Samuel Palmer.

Extracts from Letters to Mr L. R. Valpy.
. . . Surely we want domestic reform in England. It is the
vulgar fashion to decry a classical education, but how many
households would be the happier for Aristotle's distinction between
pleasure and happiness ! It seems to me that while nothing is
more silly than eccentricity for its own sake, few things are more
pernicious than the dread of being peculiar. The Quakers " took
the bull by the horns," and became " wealthy and wise " ; and it is
curious that while depriving themselves of holy privileges, yet
the daring in matters of life to follow New Testament precepts
has saved them from the exhaustion of fashionable folly, and placed
most of our wheat, and a great many other good things in their
hands. They have not been wanting in benevolence, nor sleepy in
getting the means. One of them said to me, " Friend Palmer, I
never knew a Quaker absent about money matters."
. . . The art teacher's competency to his task depends upon
his power of drawing the figure ; and if that be quite wanting
the shortest way is through the school at Brompton (if he have
some power), then at least a year's study of the Antique at the
Royal Academy.
But, in nine cases out of ten, people don't want real teaching
for their daughters, but some fine, touched-up drawings to show, in
which they do not repeat themselves, but their masters. I have
no reason to complain, having always, in London, had as much
teaching as I could desire ; but it is my full conviction that a good
bold quack with plenty of tact, a comely presence, and well-cut
Hoby boots, would beat any real artist out of the field — as a
teacher. I mean as to the figure he would cut on Schedule D.
J. M. W. Turner tried teaching a little, but was discharged for
incompetency ! ! ! His lectures were curious, for he was always
losing his place. But he knew something which no one else did.

398 THE LETTERS OF
In the great social organ nothing pleases like the "SWELL"
stop. Your friend being the reverse of all this, what a pity it is that
he can't turn his literary accomplishments to account. There
must be much more pleasure in teaching Latin Grammar than
drawing, for it is a thing that some will take the pains to learn ;
but what amateur will learn, or has time for, among all the other
" accomplishments," the grammar of Art ? And, after all, in the
sciolism of so-called education, originality and natural character
are so repressed that scores of young ladies (charming as they are
in other respects), "Come out" at last as like each other men
tally as a batch of rolls out of an oven. And all this after such a
fag at Multi-science (which Heraclitus has warned us will never
teach wisdom) that if you put down on paper the sum total of the
time demanded by the masters, each for his "accomplishment,"
every day, I happen to know that they amount to rather more than
twenty-four hours ; leaving an absolute minus for eating, drinking,
sleeping, and exercise : indeed nothing short of days thirty hours
long would suffice them.
In entering at the Brompton Schools, the pupil explains his
aim. In this case it would be, of course, the figure ; because the
plaster teaches drawing in a tenth of the time required by other
courses of study : nor do they answer the end after all. Of course
success requires energy — bull-dog tenacity. " O ! well and happy
shall they be " on whose funeral tablets we might inscribe, each by
each, HE WAS A CHRISTIAN BULL-DOG.
If there had been no Christian bull-dogs the Church and
the World would have been in a doleful case by this time. . . .
. . . The still small voice is everything. What is prosperity,
without it, but a violated responsibility.
Let the rich (that is those rich ones who do not heed that
voice) rejoice " in that he is made low," says St. James " because as
the flower of the grass he shall pass away." So as to parting with
worldly goods, even to the last shred, it is only a matter of time.
What prosperity spares and accumulates, death swallows up in a
moment. The secular view seems to suggest two things among many.
Firstly, whether the very adversity itself may not be turned to ad-

SAMUEL PALMER. 3g9
vantage ; as they say Sir Robert Peel's first ill success at college
wrought a self-revenge which was the making of him.
Secondly, on any disappointment, it seems wholesome some
times to begin again as it were : eminent artists have had to do
this. Etty spent his early life in it. I remember Collins saying
''Why don't we begin again?" Mulready replied, " / do begin
again." Mulready was one of the few who realized Lavater's
advice to devote ourselves to each new undertaking as if it were
our test — our first work and our last. It seems to me that, in this
competitive age, we must not allow ourselves to " take things
easily" ; but as Sir J. J. Gurncy advised his young friend, "give
our whole minds to one thing at one time."
Of course we should lay hold of a thing by its readiest handle,
but that is another matter.
If Fortune (as they say) hurls a rough rock at us, and misses
by ever so little, what if we turn ourselves about, and make it the
first stone of our breakwater ? As to the storm itself the sailors
teach us very well — taking in sail betimes, and making the ship
'¦' snug," as they call it. The battle of life demands a combination
of various qualities, and some that seem contradictory : " wise as
serpents, harmless as doves." Once I thought that I had hit it
and that one should try to be a Christian bull-dog. The
Christian element would make it harmless, and the bull-dog
would come even upon the best things with the advantage of
" holding them fast." ... I would fain hope that everyone is
always " beginning again," and never trusting to another what he
should do himself. I think I found benefit from reading Foster's
essay on Decision. Foster's Essays. He was a preacher among
the " Baptists."
... I am torn to pieces with the quantity of matters
which want seeing to, and I find this [writing] a truer rest after
severe study, then doing nothing. A doctor once ordered me to ,
lie upon the sofa and do nothing. I did so for a minute, and
started up with a howl !
. . . Both Mrs. P. and S. P. are so thoroughly exhausted,
and dead-beaten by the sight of really fine pictures, as to be
the most wretched company in the evening. So few as three
genuine, uncleaned pictures, say of Raffaelle, Claude, and Titian,

400 THE LETTERS OF
wake me up so thoroughly, that sleep revenges himself afterwards
like a mighty giant and knocks me down with his club. An
" exposition of sleep " like Mr. Bottom's, which Titania and all
her Elfin revelry may not disperse.

qxxvi. To Mr. W. Williams.
Red Hill, March 14, 1881.
Dear Mr. Williams  You ask for my "judgment of
Carlyle." If I felt equal to such an effort it would probably
resemble your own.
He tried to make the purse-proud English ashamed of their
gentility, respectability, and rubbish. He taught that work was
noble, idleness shameful ; that ladies and gentlemen who live to
please themselves live the life of a beast — of the poodle on their
hearth-rug; that duty, not pleasure, was "our being's end and
aim " ; that realities were better than shams. But to make the
" upper-middle classes " swallow all this, he was obliged to disguise
medicinal truth, not exactly in nectar, but in a Scotch porridge
manufactured for the purpose, a notable " sham " of his own.
This was the dialect long since known as " Carlylese " ; a mode
of expression which, to any degree, would obscure, magnify, and
colour the thought, or the subject; would mist-magnify it,- like
something seen through a haze. He knew that " the ancients had
stolen all our best thoughts " and most of the best subjects, and
that the second-best must be dealt with paradoxically to be suffi
ciently piquant for the loungers of the "London Season." Every
one knew all that could possibly be known concerning Dr. Johnson :
here, therefore, was a fine opportunity. His audience came out of
the lecture-room persuaded that hitherto they had seen nothing
but Johnson's skin, and that Carlyle had shown them the Man.
This, however, was the mist-magnified and many-coloured Johnson,
whom Francis Barber would not have recognized, and from whom
" Hodge " would have fled for his life.
Mr. Carlyle was one of the leaders of the Wonderful School.
Almost to the last page of an essay he keeps you on the tenter
hooks of expectation for some discovery— some rocket-like explo
sion of a thousand discoveries; some ultra-Solomonic wisdom,
which will make Hooker, and Bacon, and Milton, and Newton,

SAMUEL PALMER. 401
and Butler, seem like a bench of old daddies warming themselves
in the sun. It is true that the wisdom-rockets never explode, but
there is some strange attraction in Carlylese which beguiles you
through the next essay and the next, with like expectation and
with like result, till you are wear)- of it at last.
As to rhythmical prose (to change the subject), it was only
revived by Dr. Johnson. It was supreme from Hooker's days
down to Barrow's, inclusively. For the Queen Anneites (Addison
for instance) it was not sufficiently colloquial. I think you will
find Johnson's " we were now treading that illustrious island " &c.
quite rhythmical and melodious.
It is long since I read the review of Jenyns, but it can never be
forgotten. Doubtless you know Jenyns' retaliation epitaph: —
" Here lies Sam Johnson ; reader have a care,
Tread lightly or you'll wake a sleeping bear :
Religious, moral, generous and humane
He was ; but self-sufficient, proud and vain ;
Fond of and overbearing in dispute,
A Christian and a scholar, but a brute.
With love from all to all, believe me in haste, Yours affec
tionately, S. Palmer.

CXXA'II. To Mr. B. Hook.
Red Hill, March 26, 1881.
My dear Bry. I am in daily fruition of your delightful
almanack, which really adds an item to every day's happiness ;
or, as some would express it, subtracts an item from each day's
misery ; and I very sincerely thank you for it, more especially as
it reminds me every morning of the giver, and the dear friends at
Silverbeck: and so much [that] I have been intending to write,
ever since my first hour's enjoyment in pulling off leaf after leaf till
I came to the right date. Yet this did not seem matter enough
for a letter ; and until this moment (inclusive) I have been too
stupid to think of anything whatever.
" I knock my head to try if sense will come,
Knock as I will, there's nobody at home."
My wife says " Only sit down to it and I am sure you will find
something to write." But I reply " Nothing can come of nothing."
It is not wilfulness either, or a dumb demon such as occasion-
d n

402 THE LETTERS OF SAMUEL PALMER.
ally possessed a little cousin of mine, then at home, busy with the
first elements. There would be some one word in his spelling-
lesson which he knew how to spell rightly enough, but by no per
suasion could be prevailed upon to do so. They gave him a cold
bath, whipped out the demon for a time, but he came again. Once
I prevailed upon him to spell the word in question, which, after
much tender persuasion, he did ; and I reported that he had done
so, hoping to save him from punishment ; but soon after he was up
the next morning he was playing hare to the hounds round and
round the garden, till they caught him atlast and brought him in for
a birching. The birching was blest, as the ordinances of God will
be, and I saw him the other day, a worthy, cheerful, old gentleman.
O that there were time to collect from a co pious dictionary all
the epithets of disgust, abhorrence, and contempt, with which to
designate the pernicious folly of those whom the Devil has per
suaded to banish the rod from the nursery,1 and to substitute "moral
suasion " ; the words make me sick at the stomach !
Moral suasion for babies !
A birching for such gabies, is the involuntary rhyme. However,
it is part of the epidemic infidelity of the age, rich in facts and
phenomena, and just as deplorably poor in foresight, right reason,
and knowledge of human nature. How men can have the patience,
energy, and penetration to collect and arrange so many facts, and
yet be so childishly weak, or fantastically absurd in their infer
ences, it is indeed hard to conceive. It reminds me of what Sir
Humphry Davy makes " Poietes " say of Erasmus Darwin (the
poet) in his Salmonia. " POIETES. I think Halietus is quite in the
right to be a little angry at your observation, Physicus, in making
him the disciple of a writer, who, as well as I can recollect, has
deduced the genesis of the human being, by a succession of changes
dependent, upon irritabilities, sensibilities, and appetencies, from
the fish : blending the wild fancies of Buffon with the profound
ideas of Hartley, and thus endeavouring to give currency to an
absurd romance by mixing with it some philosophical truths."
Dinner is up — if that filthy " moral suasion " will suffer me to
eat. Believe me, with united love to all, your nauseated but
affectionate friend, S. PALMER.
P It is singular that although, throughout the whole of his life, my father strenu
ously advocated corporal punishment, the rod was quite unknown in his own house. He
rarely punished, and when he did, the punishment was slight. — Ed.]

CATALOGUE OF
EXHIBITED WORKS

D D 2

A Kentish Hop Garden.
A CATALOGUE OF THE
EXHIBITED WORKS AND THE ETCHINGS
OF SAMUEL PALMER

The Royal Academy

1819. 1

1820.1821.1823.
1824.
1825.

257. Landscape with Ruins.
259. Cottage Scene : Banks of the Thames, Battersea.
414. A Study.
185. Wood Scene : a Study from Nature.
49. A Study from Nature : Battersea.
32. View.
504. Landscape: Twilight.
706. Study of a Head.
384. A Scene from Kent.

4o6 CATALOG UE.
A rustic Scene.
Late Twilight.
The Skirts of a Wood.
A rustic Scene.
The Deluge : a Sketch.
Ruth returned from gleaning.
The Sheep-fold.
Scene near Shoreham, Kent.
A pastoral Scene : Twilight.
A pastoral Landscape.
A Harvest Scene.
Landscape: Twilight.
Late Twilight.
The Gleaning Field.
The Harvest-moon.
Landscape : Twilight.
Rustic Scene.
A Kentish Scene.
Landscape : Evening.
The Flock.
The Harvest Field.
Landscape: Twilight.
A rustic Scene.
The Cottage Window.
Scene from Lee, North Devon.
The Corn Field.
Pistil Mawddach, near Pistil- y-Cain, NorthWai.es.
, Near Pont-y-Pandu Mill, Bettws-y-Coed, North
Wales.
Pistil-y-Cain, North Wales.
Caernarvon Castle, North Wales.
The Chudleigh Rocks, North Devon.
Pompeii : the Street of the Tombs.
" Where are the golden roofs? Where those who dared to build? "
1 841. 42. 677. A Street in Rome : drawn on the spot.
Cattle at the Brook: a Scene at Norton, near
Faversham, Kent.
The Bay of Bai*.
1842. 45. 183. Landscape from near Silton, Dorsetshire.
The Ponte Rotto, Temple of Vesta, and Palace of
the C/esars, Rome.

1825.

10.

410.

1826.

II.

570.

12.

714.

13-

849.

1829.

14.

516.

IS-

641.

1832.

16.

J493-

17-
497-
18.
547-
19-
605.
20.
614.
21.
816.
22.
818.
1833-
23-
48.
24.
64.
25.
166.
26.
356.
27.
657.
1834.
28.
49-
29.
119.
3o.
280.
31-
419.
32.
517.
33-
1010.
1835-
34-
90.
35-
153-
1836.
36.
656.
1837-
37-
553-
38-
574-
39-
670.
40.
932-
1840.
41.
1005.
42.
677.
43-
702.
44.
1 197.
45-
183.
46.
896.
CA TALOGUE.

407

1865. 47. 872. Evening Pastures : Etching.
48. 876. " The Ploughman homeward plods his weary way":
Etching.
1873. 49. 1283. The Morning of Life : Etching.
50. 1296. The Morning spread upon the Mountains: Etching.

The British Institution

1819.

I.

141.

2,

169.

1821.

3-

156.

4-

278.

1822.

5-

IOI.

6.

106.

7-
195-
1834.
8.
10.
9-
205.
10.
315-
11.
342.
12.
400.
1835.
13-
47-
14.
154.
IS-
34i-
16.
502.
1837.
17-
275.
1843. 18. 115.
Bridck Scene: Composition. [25 x 21 inches.]
Landscape: Composition. [39 x 34.]
Study from Nature, at Battersea. [24 x 20.]
Langley Locks, Herts.
A Lane Scene, Battersea. [24 x 20.]
Hailsham, Sussex : Storm coming on. [40 x 36.]
On the Thames : Evening. [30 x 25.]
Landscape. [12 x io.]
The Reaper. [17 x 15.]
A Study from Nature. [24 x 16.]
Evening. [33 x 27.]
Landscape, (ii X 9.]
A Scene near Shoreham, Kent. [21 x 18.]
At Filston Farm, Kent. [20 x 17.]
The Lane side. [31 x 25.]
Cottage Window. [17 x 16.]
The Cataract of Pistil-y-Cain, North Wales.
[45 X 39-]
Pastoral Landscape in the South of England.
[28 x 24.]
The Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours
1843.
1. 56.
2. 114.
3- I3i-
4- 197-
5. 218.
associate, 1843-54. member, 1854-81.
The Colosseum and Alban Mount.
Harlech Castle : Twilight.
"The moon is up, and yet it is not night.'7
At Donnington, Berkshire ; the Birthplace of
Chaucer.
Old Farm, near Thatcham, Berks.
Rustic Scene, near Thatcham, Berkshire.
408

1843.

6.

238.

7-

304-

8.
312.
1844.
9-
10.
CATALOG UE.
Evening : the Ruins of a Walled City.
The Bay of Bai^e from Monte Nuovo.
The Campagna and Aqueducts of Rome.
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.
"And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said,
I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." — Gen. xxxii. 26.
10. 75. The Village of Papigno on the Nar, Between Terni
and the Falls.
" The river glideth at his own sweet will."
11. 89. The Guardian of the Shores : Twilight after Rain.
"The storm-rent vapours pass, and lurid shapes
Fantastic hover o'er the dusky shore."
12. 133. The Monastery: A Scene from Southern Italy'.
13. 246. The Poet's Grave. English Burial-ground at Rome ;
the Burial-place of Keats.
" Belov'd till verse can charm no more,
And mourn'd, till Pity's self be dead."
14. 264. Mountain Pastures.
' ' Sometimes with secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite. "
15. 278. The Silver City: Morning on the Jura Mountains,
looking towards the Alps.
16. 286. The " Glimmering Landscape."
" The ploughman homeward plods his weary way."
1845. 17. 98. La Vocatella: A Chapel built by a Hermit near
Corpo di Cava, in the Neighbourhood of
Salerno and Naples.
18. 122. The City of Rome and the Vatican, from the
western Hills. Pilgrims resting on the last
Stage of their Journey.
19. 158. Evening in Italy : The Deserted Villa.
' ' The sun sets red and rises bright ;
But yon grey halls are still as night,
With masque and revel wake no more
The echoes of the past'ral shore."
20. 159. Tivoli and the Campagna of Rome, with the Water-
organ and the great Cypresses of the Villa
d'Este. The City of Rome in the remote.
distance.
21. 272. Florence and Val d'Arno.
CA TA LOG UE.

409

1845. 22. 306. Porta di Posilipo and the Bay of Balk, with Ischia
and the Promoniory of Misenum.
"The balmy spirit of the western gale,
Eternal breathes on fruits untaught to fail."
23- 337- At Sunset.- The Mountains mehind Pjestum and
Salerno, a\i> part of the Salernian Gui.f,
from the Slopes of Monti: Finestre.
The aged Oak.
The Corn Field.
Children gleaning.
A Lank Scene.
The listening Gleaner.
Crossing the Brook.
A Farm-yard near Risborough, Bucks.
The Broken Bridge.
A Landscape : Sunset.
The Corn Field: cloudy Morning.
The Gipsy Dell : Moonlight.
The Skirts of a Village.
Sion Hill, Underriver, Kent.
Mountain Flocks.
Woodland Scenery.
The Ruins of a Monastery : Storm coming on.
Christian descending into the Valley of Humilia
tion. Vide " Pilgrim's Progress."
Mercury driving away the Cattle of Admetus.
Carting the Wheat.
Crossing the Common : Sunset.
Farewell to Calypso !
Sir Guyon, with the Palmer attending, tempted by
Ph^dria to land upon the enchanted Islands.
Faery Queen.
Sun and Shade : Arestorides.
Sheltering from the Storm.
King Arthur's Castle, Tintagel, Cornwall.
Sylvan Quiet-.
Crossing the Heath.
Gleaners crossing a shallow Stream.
Children nutting.
Wind and Rain.
St. Paul landing in Italy.
55. 217. Robinson Crusoe guiding his Raft up the Creek.

1846.

24.

108.

25-

111.

26.

"3-

27.

120.

28.
I -*2
29.
141.
3°-
201.
1847.
3i-
I48.
32-
I76.
33
241.
34-
253-
35-
259.
1848.
36.
5-
37-
Si-
38-
122.
39-
175-
40.
204.
41.
217.
42-
228.
43-
251.
1849.
44-
88.
45-
100.
46.
149.
47-
I7S-
48.
222.
49-
244.
50.
2SS-
Si-
334-
1850.
52-
58.
S3-
177.
54-
205.
1850.

56.

3°4-

57-

326.

1851.

58.

192.

59-

3°3-

60.

321.

61.
107.
62.
237-
63-
251.
64.
263.
65.
275.
1853-
66.
18.
67.
210.
68.
228.
i8S4-
69.
241.
70.
252.
1855.
71-
73-
410 CATALOG UE.
Cattle in the shallows : Summer Evening.
Carting the Wheat : Showery Weather.
The Windmill.
Sheep in the Shade.
The breezy Heath.
A showery Morning : Scenery of west Somerset.
The Forester's Horn.
Shady Quiet.
The approach of Dinner.
The Skirts of a Common.
The Rustic Dinner.
Children and Sheep.
Haste and Patience.
Fast travelling.
The folded Flock.
The Dell of Comus.
' ' This evening late, by then the chewing flocks
Had ta'en their supper on the savoury herb
Of knot-grass dew-besprent, and were in fold,
I sat me down to watch upon a bank
With ivy canopied, and interwove
With flaunting honey-suckle, and began,
Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
To meditate my rural minstrelsy,
Till fancy had her fill ; but ere a close,
The wonted roar was up amidst the woods."
The Rustic Conversazione.
Sunset over the gleaning Fields.
The Bay of Naples.
1856. 75. 147. The Brothers, guided by the attendant Spirit,
discovering the Palace and Bowers of Comus.
' ' Attendant Spirit. Immur'd in cypress shades the sorcerer dwells.
You may
Boldly assault the necromancer's hall ;
Where if he be, with dauntless hardihood
And brandish'd blade rush on him, break his glass,
And shed the luscious liquor on the ground ;
But seize his wand ; though he and his curs'd crew
Fierce sign of battle make and menace high."
76. 153. The Brothers in 'Comus 'lingering under the Vine.
' ' Two such I saw, what time the labour'd ox
In his loose traces from the furrow came,
And the swinkt hedger at his supper sat ;
I saw them under a green mantling vine ;
That crawls along the side of yon small hill,
Plucking ripe clusters from the tender shoots."
72.
251.
73-
255
74-
277.
75-
147.
78.

238.

79-

240.

8o.

248.

81.

250.

82.

284.

83-

313.

CATALOGUE. 4„
1857. 77. 6. Two Years ago on the southern Coast: The British
Fleet in sight.
First Love.
The dip of the Sun.
The LovE-LErrER.
Welcome home.
A bright Day in Autumn.
The Fisherman's Wife: squally Weather passing
over.
1858. 84. 229. The Proposal.
' ' Look where he comes forlorn ! — say ' ' Yes. "
85. 238. The Widow's Daughter.
"Two comforts had that widowed soul,
Her Bible and her Daughter."
86. 256. Going to India: The Father's Blessing and the
Mother's Prayer.
87. 258. " The Bluebell."
"Give her this glass of mulled ale, good-wife! That will be
wanner work than shaking hands in the moonlight."
88. 264. The Honeymoon : in the Background the Rocks of
Kynance.
Fortune-telling : the Gipsy and the Waggoner.
The rising Moon.
1859. 91. 175. The Comet of 1858, as seen from the Skirts of Dart
moor.
Returned from India.
The Romance of Life.
The Rising Moon.
A Letter from India.
The Fishing-boat going out.
Returning from the Vintage. —
The Morning of Life.
i860. 99. 112. The Ballad.
The Abbey.
Mountain Pastures.
From the first Voyage.
1861. 103. 68. The Abbey Stream.
Distant Mountains.
In the chequered Shade.
After the Storm.
In Vintage time.
Sunset on the Mountains.

89.

266.

90.

312.

9. 91.

175-

92.

186.

93-

210.

<r— 94-

219.

95-

232.

96.

236.

97-

241.

98.

243-

3. 99.

112.

IOO.

IS7-

IOI.

172.

102.

235-

I. I03.

68.

I04.

127.

I05.

133-

106.

183.

I07.

216.

I08.

226.

412

CATALOG UE.

1861. 109. 232. The Streamlet.
1862. no. 241. The Patriarch of the Orchard.
" They climb and fill their baskets grey ;
Swing by the boughs, and pelt and play ;
So played, in its maturity,
Their grandsires round that hoary tree. "
m. 251. In the Country.
" The sunshine over hill and dale,
The fresh field and the foaming pail. "
112. 259. A Poet.
"The sisters listening to his verse were moved,
And Madeline the simple goatherd loved. "
113. 267. The Fisherman's Wife.
' ' The storm and anxious night are passed ;
The wished for sail appears at last."
114. 291. Wrecked at Home.
" Th' occasion met, the peril braved,
A brother and a husband saved."

WINTER EXHIBITION.

115. 390. The Furze-field.
116. 407. Finished Study for a Picture :" The shadowy Pool.
' ' The thirsty oxen from the sunshine wind
Into the shadowy corner of a pool."

1863. 117. 229. The Brother come Home from Sea.
' ' Awake ! awake ! our Robin is come home ;
Just landing by the bay, no more to roam ! :
Brothers and sisters answer to his cheer,
And 'twill be merry in the cottage there :
Pullet and junket, and the old brown ale,
And all agape to hear the traveller's tale."
118. 238. The Sheep-shearers.
" But who, from England's olden time,
Sent Jason's freight to every clime,
With generous wealth and plenty blest,
Our loom-built cities of the West ?
Poor shepherds shearing in a row,
U pon some sunny upland brow. "

CATALOGUE. 4,3

1863. 119. 285. The Sacred Ruin.

" Upon the marish in the vale
A vapoury sun look'd wan and pale,
The Abbey rose — the ground was till'cl,
The sun on golden harvests smiled :
And still he loves that ruin grey,
Making it golden in decay,
And lends a colouring of his own
Where once the deep-stain'd windows shone."

/ 1 INTER EX HI B I TION.
120. 65. The Chapel by the Bridge. [Known also as " Twilight."]
"There was a little oratory by the bridge foot, and as we
approached in the dying light we could hear the chanted
responses."
121. 303. A Dream in the Forest.
¦ ' In such green palaces the first kings reigned—
Slept in their shades and angels entertained." — Waller.
122. 316. "On Summer Eves by haunted Stream."
123. 323. " The Traveller's Rest."
" They help the girls and children down,
Belated from the market-town ;
The cheer is good, the fagot bright,
Within the oaken screen to-night."
124. 358. Mountain Pastures.
" The milkmaids on the mountain brow,
The heather fleck'd with fleecy snow."

125. 150. A Dream in the Apennine.
" Suddenly, at a turn in the mountain road, we looked for the first
time on that Plain ; the dispenser of law, the refuge of philosophy,
the cradle of faith. Ground which Virgil trod and Claude invested
with supernatural beauty, was sketched — but ' with a trembling
pencil."

126.

189.

127.

196.

128.

320.

129.

366.

WINTER EXHIBITION.
The early Ploughman. [Known also as " Dawn."]
Lycidas.Study of a Waterfall near Trefriew, North Wales.
" The River glideth at his ownJsweet Will."

414 CATALOGUE.
1864. 130. 368. Near Clovelly : A Page from the Blot-book.
131. 421. Going Home at Curfew-time.
"And now wind homeward in the dying light ;
Homeward, my flocks, for Hesperus is bright. "
132. 434. Hovering Clouds.

1865. 133. in. The good Farmer.
" Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began."
134. 271. The close of a clear Day.
"That promises each past'ral lawn
A starry night, an amber dawn. "
135- 273. The golden Hour. [ Known also as " The Glorious
Sunset."]
" Though heaven and earth with August glow,
Our island streams unstinted flow."

WINTER EXHIBITION.
136. 105. A Sketch in Clovelly Park, looking towards the
Cliffs on the further side of Mouth-Mill Ravine.
137. m. Study of a, Middle Distance : Clovelly Park, North
Devon.
The boundary line is the abrupt edge of high cliffs which
have little or no table-land, the ground inclining thus in
woody slope.
138. • 348. Hope, or the lifting of the Cloud.
"The day at first was sombre, like the shadowy turrets we
were to explore. Then there was a distant gleam ; the breeze
began to stir, and the rain-cloud, slowly rising, disclosed the
mountains."
139. 352. The haunted Turret.
"All day the clouds had hovered over the mountain, but about
sunset they parted ; the cumuli rested far off, and the turrets glim
mered in a more genial light."

1866. 140. 253. Storied Summits: From the "Legends of West
Surrey."
"Who dropped the rock upon that central hill?"

CATALOGUE. 415
1866. 141. 305. A Day-dream of Salerno, with the old Liburnus,
from the Slopes of Montk Finestre.
"More pleasing than the fitful gleam,
With storm behind and gathering nigh,
Still to frequent the temperate shade,
Look far and see the prospect bright."

142.

60.

H3-

194.

144.

237-

WINTER EXHIBITION.
A Study at Tintern : drawn on the spot.
Florence: drawn on the spot.
A Study of Woody Hill and Slate Mountain near
Festiniog, North Wales.
145- 353- Arthur's Gate : a Legend of Tintagel.
" They say that under that postern the body of King Arthur
passed to burial."

1867. 146. 252. At Backways, near Tintagel : drawn on the spot.
1868. 147. 16. From "Il Penseroso." [Known also as "The Lonely
Tower."]
" Or let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high lonely tow'r,
Where I may oft out-watch the Bear,
With thrice great Hermes, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato, to unfold
What worlds or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind, that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook."
148. 93. A Towered City : From " L' Allegro." [Known also as
" The Haunted Stream."]
"There let Hymen oft appear
In saffron robe, with taper clear,
And pomp and feast and revelry,
With mask and antique pageantry,
Such sights us youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.''
149. 193. MORNING. [Known also as " The Dripping Eaves."]
" Not trick'd and frounc'd as she was wont
With the Attic boy to hunt,
But kercheft in a comely cloud,
While rocking winds are piping loud,
Or usher'd with a shower still,
When the gust hath blown his fill,
Ending on the rustling leaves,
With minute drops from off the eaves."

416 CATALOGLE.
1868. 150. 200. Pompeian Memories.
1870. 151. 97. The Curfew.
' ' Oft on a plat of rising ground
I hear the far-off curfew sound,
Over some wide-water'd shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar.''
152. 105. The Near and the Distant: from Southern Italy.
[Known also as " Italy Far and Near."]
1871. 153. 161. The Fall of Empire. [Known also as "The Colosseum."]
' ' There is given
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent,
A spirit's feeling, and where he hath leant
His hand, but broke his scythe, there is a power
And magic in the ruin'd battlement,
For which the palace of the present hour
Must yield its pomp, and wait till ages are its dower."
154. 205. An ancient Manor House, beneath
" The western downs of lovely Albion."

WINTER EXHIBITION.
155. 317. A Cascade in Shadow, drawn on the Spot, near the
junction of the Machno and Conway, North
Wales.
156. 378. Papigno on the Nar, below the Falls of Terni.
[Bistre.]
" Fluminaque antiquos subterlabentia muros."

1872. 157. 245. Crossing the Brook: scenery of western Surrey.
The Cumulus in Miniature.
1873. i58- 79- A golden City.
"Oh, Rome ! my country ! city of the soul !
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires ! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.
What are our woes and sufferance ? Come and see
The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye !
Whose agonies are evils~bf a day —
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay."

CATALOGUE. 417
1873. 159. 112. LYCIDAS.
" Together both ere the high lawns appear'd
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and lioth together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night."
1874. 160. 91. Old England's Sunday Evening.
1875. 161. 272. The Travellers.
1877.162. 5. The Waters Murmuring : from " Il Penseroso."
"There in close covert by some brook,
Where no profaner eye may look,
Hide me from day's garish eye,
Whde the bee with honied thigh,
That at her flowery work doth sing
And the waters murmuring
Wiih such consort as they keep
Entice the dewy-feather'd sleep."
163. 100. Tityrus restored to his Patrimony.
" O fortunate old man !
Then these ancestral fields are yours again ;
And wide enough for you. Though naked stone,
And marsh with slimy rush abut upon
The lowlands, yet your pregnant ewes shall try
No unproved forage ; neighb'ring flocks, too nigh,
Strike no contagion, nor infect the young.
O fortunate, who now at last among
Known streams and sacred fountain-heads, have found
A shelter and a shade on your own ground."

WINTER EXHIBITION.
164. 380. Autumn.
165. 402. In Memoriam: a recollection of the Burial-place
of Keats, near the Pyramid of Caius Cestus,
Rome. [Sepia.]
166. 431. Ploughmen.
" Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening."
167. 435. Crossing the Brook.

1878. 168. 238. River Banks at Even.
1879. 169. 240. Hasting to Covert .- a threatening Rain-storm.
170. 257. Mountain Stream and an Ancient Fortress.

E E

418 CATALOGUE.
WINTER EXHIBITION.
1879. 171. 352. Western Shores.
172. 360. Going to Fold.

•1880. 173. 218. Sabrina.
" Still she retains
Her maiden gentleness, and oft at eve
Visits the herds along the twilight meadows. '

WINTER EXHIBITION.
174. 313. Aurora.
" Now with her rosy fingers had the dawn
From glimmering Heaven the veil of night withdrawn,
And folded flocks were loose to browse anew
O'er mountain-thyme and trefoil wet with dew."

1881. 175. 18. The Prospect : from " L'Allegro."
" Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,
Whilst the landscape round it measures ;
Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray ;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest ;
Meadows trim with daisies pide,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide :
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies
The cynosure of neighb'ring eyes.''
176. 56. The Eastern Gate : from " L'Allegro."
" Right against the Eastern gate,
Where the great sun begins his state,
Rob'd in flames and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight ;
While the ploughman near at hand
Whistles o'er the furrow'd land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.'-

CA TALOGUE.
WINTER EXHIBITION.
1881. 177. 364. Eventide.

410

1882. 178. — . the Bellman : from " Il Penseroso."
"  the Bellman's drowsy charm
To bless the doors from nightly harm."

The Society of British Artists

1836. 1. 45. the Hop Pickers.
2. 586. Pistil Mawddach, near Pistil-y-Cain, North Wales.
3- 640. Trefriew Mill, on the road from Bettws-y-Coed
to Conway, North Wales : drawn on the spot.
1842. 4. 86. Scene at Zeal's Park, Wilts.
1873- 5- 369- A Rustic Scene.
6. 371. Gleaners returning Home.

L'Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1853

1063. Ulysse s'eloignant de l'Ile de Calypso.

The Manchester Art Treasures, 1857
[Water Colours.]

1. 607. Windmill. (Lent by Mr. F. Dillon.)
2. 608. The Brothers : ("Comus.") (Lent by Mr. S. Palmer.)

International Exhibition, 1862
[Water Colours.]

1. 1081. Returned from India. (Lent by Mr. T. Williams.)

420 CATALOGUE.
1873. 2. 1 107. The Rising Moon; (Lent by Mr. F. Robinson.)
3. 1 1 15. After the Storm. (Lent by Mr. W. Quilter ) .
4. 1 1 16. The Ballad. (Lent by Mr. F. Craven.)

L'Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1867

1. 78. Laboureur Matinal. (Appartenant a M. L. R. Valpy.)
2. 79. Lycidas. (Appartenant a M. L. R. Valpy.)
3. 80. La Chapelle pres du pont. (Appartenant a M. L. R
Valpy.)

The Grosvenor Gallery, 1879

1. 881. Memories of Pompeii. (Lent by Mr. C L. Collard.)
2. 882. The Golden Hour. (Lent by Mr. G. Gurney.)
3. 1074. Lycidas. (Lent by Mr. G. Gurney.)
"Together both ere the high lawns appear'd
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn."
4. 1082. Going to Evening Church. (Lent by Mr. J. W.
Overbury.) [An early Shoreham Work.]

At Manchester, 1887

1. 1 169. Calypso's Island. (Lent by Mr. J. Haworth.)
2. 1679. Oxen Ploughing. (Lent by Mr. J. S. Bolton.)
3. 1762. Harvest Field. (Lent by Mr. R. R. Ross.)

The Royal Academy Winter Exhibition, 1891
1. 139- Lvcidas. [23 x I5i inches.] (Lent by Mr. G. Gurney.)

CATALOGUE. 42,
1873. 2. 140. The Golden Hour. [13! x 10.] (Lent by Mr. G.
Gurney.)
3. 145. Tityrus restored to his Patrimony. [27I x 20.]
(Lent by Mr. G. Gurney.)

In the Historical Collection of English Water-Colour
Drawings at South Kensington
538. Going to Sea. (Ellison Gift.)

ETCHINGS
The Plates marked * are destroyed.

1. The Willow. Probationary Plate on election to the Etching Club,
1850.
2. The Herdsman's Cottage ; or Sunset. Published in The Portfolio,
November, 1872, as Sunrise (see letter to Mr. R. Seeley, No. LXXXVl),
and in Hamerton's Etching and Etchers, third edition.
3. Christmas ; or Folding the Last Sheep, from Bampfylde's Sonnet.
Published in A Memoir of S. Palmer, 1882.
*4. The Sleeping Shepherd. Published by the Etching Club, 1857.
*5. The Skylark. Published by the Etching Club, 1857.
*6. The RISING MOON. Known also as A British Pastoral and Evening
Pastures. Published by the Etching Club, 1857.
*7. The Vine ; or Plumpy Bacchus (two subjects on one plate). Published
by the Etching Club, 1852.
*8. The Herdsman ; or Tardus Bubulcus. Published by the Etching Club,
1865.
9. The Early Ploughman ; or The Morning Spread upon the Mountains.
Published in Hamerton's Etching and Etchers, first edition, 1868.
*io. The Morning of Life ; or Work and Gossip. Published by the
Etching Club, 1872.

422

CA TALOGUE.

ii. The Bellman, from "Il Penseroso." Published bythe Fine Art
Society, 1879.
*i2. The Lonely Tower, from "Il Penseroso." Published by the
Etching Club, 1880.
13. Opening the Fold ; or Early Morning. Published in An English
Version of the Eclogues of Virgil, 1883.

'ih*t-.f'-
A**} u t„;t W

KK1IARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY.