Pictures for the Tenements

NOT very long ago I gave to a little girl I know a copy of one of Fra Angelico’s angels. Somewhat later I heard her, in the next room, discussing the picture with a small guest. “It’s a nice angel,” she explained; “painted in Italy.”

“Ye-es,” the other child acquiesced; “but — do you like it ?” she added, half fearfully, half defiantly.

The possessor of the angel appeared to hesitate. “I — s’pose so,” she said at length; “I know it ought to be liked!”

In the tenements one meets with a larger freedom of speech. One finds, too, rather a greater independence of thought, and a very much more unrestricted liberty of feeling. However nice may be the pictures of angels given to the dwellers in tenement neighborhoods, those pictures are quite openly rejected if not unreservedly liked. Their owners have not been informed as to what angels ought, and ought not, to be liked. But they know which they do like, and do not like; and they know why. Moreover, they are not afraid to tell.

Once, at Christmas, I sent to a woman of the tenements who was a friend of mine, and who, I knew, had a fondness for pictures of winged children, a print of Raphael’s Cherubs. “They’s real sweet,” she said to me, when next we were together; “but there’s lots prettier ones on the Christmas cards my boy has got from the Sunday School.”

It was through this woman’s younger sister that I came to see more clearly the place that what we have been solicitously trained to designate as the best pictures may take in the lives of people who must measure those pictures for themselves, unhelped, and unhindered, by traditionary standards of measurement. Going with her one day to help in the selection of her wedding dress, I noticed in the window of a picture shop we were passing an unusually fine photograph of La Gioconda, and involuntarily stopped to look at it. My companion, waiting for me, also contemplated the picture.

“Who is it?” she asked with some curiosity.

I told her a little about the Lady Lisa.

“ What’s she smilin’ at ?” was the next question.

I spoke of the Renaissance in Italy. “She lived then,” I supplemented.

“But why did it make her smile that way? ” my companion pursued.

Whereupon, as we continued on our way, I quoted what Walter Pater had said about “the presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters.”

“ I should think she would ’ave cried, ” my friend made comment. “I don’t see why she smiled !”

“No one has ever quite seen,” I found myself replying. “Every one has a favorite theory. A friend of mine says that it is because she never forgets that life is short; she does not weep, no matter what happens to herself, or to any one else, because she is remembering always that nothing happens for very long.”

“But,” objected my companion, “everybody knows we can’t live forever! I don’t see why the idea should ’ave struck the Lady Lisa as so uncommon funny! She must ’ave been an out o’ the ordinary person.”

My friend said nothing further that day concerning La Gioconda; but the memory of the first glimpse of the baffling face lingered with her, as it lingers with us all. She confided to me one evening that she did not care for the picture, but that she could not put it out of her mind. “I’d like to look at it jes’ till I found out why she is smilin’; and then never see it no more,” she added.

“ But why no more ? ” I queried. “ She is so beautiful.”

“I don’t think her beautiful,” was the reply; “she ’s only int’restin’-looking; and she would n’t be that, if people knowed why. I wish I could find out.”

She was calling upon me. On the wall of the room was a small print of the picture, “Please take it!” I said.

When next I went to see her the picture was in a position of honor, over the middle of the mantel in the “best room ” of her new home. On its right side hung a campaign portrait-poster of President Roosevelt; on the left a gaily lithographed Priscilla, cut from one of the Youth’s Companion’s current calendars. The only other picture in the room was a framed photograph of my friend and her husband, in wedding array.

Within the year a child, a little boy, was born to them. The baby, even while he was still very tiny, had a way, as he was held in his mother’s arms, of resting his head against her breast and turning his eyes away from her face, that reminded me of the child in the lap of the Madonna of the Chair. I mentioned this to my friend; and one day I gave her a photograph of the picture. She received it with far more pleasure than that with which she had accepted La Gioconda; but she did not put it in the place of Leonardo’s picture, nor, indeed, bring it into any especially close proximity. She fastened it to a narrow bit of wall between two windows; beneath it was a photograph of her baby, taken by me on the day of his christening.

There were, when we met, so many other things to discuss that the woman did not speak, for a long time, of either of the two pictures; and I supposed that they had come to be regarded by her in a purely decorative light.

But one night, before he had lived quite a year, her little son died. The morning of the day after the funeral I sat with the bereaved mother in the “best room,” so lately given over to such pitiful uses. Glancing about to assure myself that its former order had been quite restored, I noticed that the Mona Lisa was no longer over the mantel, nor in any other place in the room. Where she had been, the Madonna of the Chair now was. Mv friend, as if replying to my unspoken question, said quickly: “Nobody else did that! I did it myself!” She grasped my hand; holding it closely, she continued, “Yesterday, after they took my baby away, an’ I got back home, an’ my husband, bein’ awful tired, was sleepin’, I came in here, ’cause the baby, he’d been in here. An’ that lady in the picture, she smiled and smiled! Her smilin’ had int’rested me before ; I had n’t never liked it, but I ’d sorter liked wonderin’ ’bout it. But last night it didn’t int’rest me none! She could n’t ’ave been tender-hearted; or she’d ’ave knowed that there’s nothin ’ to smile at in learnin’ things don’t last very long — same as me ’avin ’ my baby didn’t! I wished she’d stop smilin’; but, knowin’ she could n’t, I stopped lookin’ at her, and looked at the other picture you gave me, ’cause o’ your sayin’ my baby made you think o’ the baby in it. An’ the lady in that, it seemed as if she would ave knowed, bein’ here, how I was feelin’,— which the smilin’ one would n’t ’ave. The more I looked at her, the more I thought so. It seemed as if she’d even, bein’ here, ’ave let me hold her baby a little while, mine bein’ gone. So I took down the smilin’ picture, and put the other one up there.”

She lifted her head, and gazed at me, wondering if I understood. “I could n’t ’ave done dif’rent,” she said simply.

“No; and there was no reason why you should have,” I agreed.

She had transferred the Mona Lisa, she told me, to an acquaintance in the tenement above, an older woman. “You don’t mind, do you ? ” my friend inquired. “My upstairs neighbor, she used to come in here, and look at it. She took real comfort out o’ it; so I went up this mornin’ and gave it to her. I’m glad if anybody can find it comfortin’! You don’t mind my givin’ it away, do you ? ” she repeated,

I assured her that I did not. Afterward, when the “upstairs neighbor ” questioned me similarly, I made her the same assurance. “ Whoever wants the picture ought to have it,” I added.

“I have always wanted it, ever since I first seen it downstairs,” the woman confessed. “I like her smilin’! I don’t think it’s ’cause she ain’t got no sorrow for anybody or anythin’ that she smiles; I think it’s ’cause she has, and has got grit, too. It. heartens me up surprisin’, to look at her! ”

An artist to whom I recounted both these incidents granted them, not without reluctance, a certain significance, but urged me not to imagine for an instant that they contained any elements whatsoever of artistic criticism. “A picture cannot properly be viewed in any such semi-literary, semi - didactic light. The important thing about it is, not what it means, but how it is done ! ” he pronounced.

In the tenements, however, I found the reverse of this proposition to be true. What a picture might mean, and not at all how it was done, proved, almost invariably, to be the important thing about it. A literary or a didactic light, or that commingled literary and didactic light respecting which my artistic friend had expressed himself at once so unfavorably and so uncompromisingly, seemed, in nearly every instance, to be just the light in which a picture could be — if not with most propriety, certainly with most distinctness — beheld.

During a winter, several years ago, at the college settlement in which I was especially interested, it chanced that I had charge of a considerable number of “ sight-seeing ” parties. One of these, composed of girls of from fifteen to seventeen years of age, I guided one afternoon through the rooms and corridors of the Museum of Fine Arts. The time at our disposal being so short, and the list of things to be seen so long, I made but few comments, and these of the smallest, upon any of those things.

A number of the girls came subsequently to the settlement to ask for further information concerning various pictures, and statues, and curios, that had aroused in them, severally, a particular interest. One girl desired to hear more about Greek vases. “I got much pleasure from them,” she exclaimed; “the shape of them, I liked it much, and the pictures on them!”

I told her somewhat regarding Greek vases; and then, when she asked me to tell her still more, I read aloud Keats’s Ode.

“Oh,” she said happily, as I closed the book, “I like that! It’s exactly as lovely as the vases !”

She wished to copy the lines; so I lent her the volume. The next morning, on her way to the factory in which she was employed, she called to see me. The settlement family was at breakfast. I overheard the protectively inclined maidservant at the door mentioning my name, and this fact, in rather a prohibitive tone of voice; and hastened into the hall.

“Who is it?” I inquired.

“It is I,” replied the girl, as the servant allowed her to enter; “that would give you again your book, and ask if that pot of basil, it is this one ? What I would say,” noting my bewilderment, she elucidated, “is, is the Isabella in the picture in the Museum the one in the poem within your book ? ”

When I replied in the affirmative, my caller’s regret that she had not sooner been made aware of Isabella’s pathetic story was as frank as it was keen. “ Why did n’t you tell us ? ” she sighed. “I wrish you had! I got but little of enjoyment from the picture; if the story I had known, much would I have got! So strange is it, so sweet, so sad! ”

I seized the first opportunity to make reparation, by inviting her a second time to visit the Museum wdth me, as a member of my very next party; upon which occasion, she fingered long, gazing absorbedly at Mr. Alexander’s painting.

On the other hand, another girl, who, before she heard the weird tale, had been decidedly attracted to the picture, after she had listened to it declared herself to be quite undesirous of looking at The Pot of Basil ever again. “I would n’t have admired it in the beginning,” she explained quaintly, “if I’d known it had such a haunted-house kind of story to it.”

Another friend of mine in the tenements, a woman of middle age, became disaffected with Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Beatrice d’Este, when, to her dismay, she learned that the young duchess was not “the most gentle lady ” of the Vita Nuova. She had made acquaintance with the picture through a photograph of it, exhibited in a shop window that she passed twice daily, on her way to and from the restaurant kitchen in which she was employed as cook. A salesman in the shop, of whom she had been emboldened to inquire regarding the original, had, to be sure, answered, “An Italian lady of olden times, named Beatrice.”

Seeing a copy of the portrait in The Most Illustrious Ladies of the Italian Renaissance, which I, going to call upon her, had carried with me to read in the trolley car, she would have greeted it as a picture of Dante’s Beatrice. “Why, I thought there was only but one!” she sighed, after hearing my explanation.

Her interest in Dante and his Beatrice had sprung directly from the curiosity that had been awakened in her mind by a print of Mr. John Elliott’s picture of Dante, that she saw by chance one day in the house of another of my friends.

“What is his name?” she asked me, her eyes bent upon the picture. “ He looks like a lot had happened to him.”

At her urgency, I related, from time to time as we met, no small part of all that had happened to that “youth of the Alighieri.” My friend presently tired of my references to the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and even to the city of Florence; but she remained insatiable in her eagerness to listen to the smallest fact or legend concerning Beatrice. Though she gave up, after the first canto, an attempt to peruse Dr. Cary’s version of the Divina Commedia, she read the Vita Nuova, in Professor Norton’s translation, with rare delight.

I had duly given her the Beata Beatrix, telling her that it was an “imaginary portrait.” Some one had sent me a magazine containing reproductions of the famous contemporaneous portraits of Dante; this, too, I presented to my friend. These she preferred to Mr. Elliott’s and to Rossetti’s pictures of the poet. “Maybe they ain’t good likenesses of him,” she declared ; “but anyway, the people who did ’em had seen him! They had him to go by, in paintin’ ’em! ”

Because the creator of the Beata Beatrix had not had her to go by, the woman seemed unable to accept the picture, even as an “imaginary portrait,” very seriously. For this reason she was the more disappointed to discover that, though the painter who had done the portrait of Beatrice d’Este had seen that lady frequently, Dante had never seen her at all.

“An’ I’ll never knowhow she looked ? ” she queried plaintively.

“I hardly think,” I ventured, “that the outward appearance of Beatrice was what so interested Dante.”

“It must ha’ been,” my friend rejoined. “She never talked to him; she never did nothing for him. He just saw her! That was all. It must ha’ been the way she looked that mattered to him. I ain’t speakin’ o’ the color o’ her eyes an’ hair, or anything o’ that kind,” the woman explained; “I’m speakin’ o’ her expression. If only I know’d what it was! ”

“There are persons,” I suggested conservatively; “who think that it was quite as much because Dante was a wonderful man as because Beatrice was a wonderful woman that she inspired his poetry.”

“Was n’t there a lot o’ other wonderful women livin’ then ? ” my friend demanded. “I’d only like to know,” she added more mildly, “why he chose her, out o’ them all! ”

I could but reply that only that was exactly what we all should like to know.

A paragraph in the Vita Nuova brought her into the happy way of another story of a poet and his love. One evening, calling upon me at the settlement, she suddenly inquired, “Where is that picture o’ an angel that Dante, he drawed ? ”

“It is lost! ” I replied.

“ What a pity! ” the woman exclaimed regretfully. “I have been wishin’ I could see it.”

The settlement family were perfervidly studying Browning that winter. Books of his poems and dramas were scattered somewhat profusely about the house. I found a volume belonging to me, and read aloud a portion of “One Word More.” Then, another visitor interrupting me, I said to my friend; “I will gladly lend you the book, if you care to finish the poem.”

She accepted my offer with alacrity. The next day I met her on the street. “Who was E. B. B. ? ” she asked abruptly. “The piece ’bout Dante’s angel was wrote to her,” she annotated.

Her pleasure, upon hearing, was lovely to see. “He was powerful fond o’ her, wasn’t he?” she observed. “Did she think as much o’ him ? ” she added anxiously.

By way of reassurance, I gave her the Sonnets from the Portuguese. Also, I lent her that one of my volumes of Browning’s works containing “By the Fire-Side.” It contained, too, “The Guardian Angel; ” and had for a frontispiece a reproduction of Guercino’s picture. The picture led my friend to read the poem. I had already given her, in response to her half-wistful, half-eager inquiries as to “how Mr. and Mrs. Brownin’ looked,” first, a small picture of the poet’s wife, and later an accompanying one of the poet. When she came to return my books, she said: “I like the poetry; I read more’n you told me ’bout. One was ’bout the angel on the front page. It’s nice to think o’ them two, Mr. and Mrs. Brownin’, a-sittin’ there in that church together, lookin’ at it, same as he tells.”

Some little time afterward I was so fortunate as to discover Guercino’s angel among the Perry Prints. Without further delay I took it to my friend. She placed it beneath the pictures of the two who had sat together and looked at it in its own chapel. On the opposite wall were Dante and Beatrice.

“My pictures is good company,” she once said to me; “I can think of a lot o’ beautiful things that’s true, when I look at ’em.”

None of those things that she seemed to think about most were, or had ever been, hers. Her husband, whom, as well as her three children, she supported, was adrunkard. He wasnever kind,and often cruel, to his wife. But coarse and ugly as the realities of her life were, she had her ideals; and these were of an exquisite delicacy and loveliness.

One evening, to my discomposure, she spoke to me about the recently published Love - Letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “ I saw the books of ’em on the table in the Public Library the other night when I was waitin’ there to meet you.”

“I suppose you read some of them? ” I said noncommittally.

“I started to,” the woman from the tenements replied; “but,” she unexpectedly continued, “I didn’t keep on. I could tell, after I’d read no more’n two or three of ’em, that they was private. How’d they get round, for anybody happenin’ along to see ? ” she questioned curiously.

The zestful spirit of the collector is not lacking in the picture-lovers of the tenements. The collections are made, and arranged, by subjects rather than by schools.

I know one woman who is interested in the acquisition of pictures of children. She possesses, among many others,reproductions of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Little Samuel, and Millais’s Two Little Princes in the Tower, and Velasquez’s Infanta Margarita, and Whistler’s Little Rose, and the portrait of Longfellow’s small daughters. A more sophisticated collector, to whom I quoted this partial list, said that, to his mind, it appeared not to be confined very closely within the limits of its subject.

A boy I know, an ardent maker of a collection, allowed himself even greater liberty in the admission of additions to his catalogue. One day, feasting his eyes upon a picture of the Bunker Hill monument that I had given him as a memento of a joyous pilgrimage he had made with me to the celebrated battleground, he ejaculated; “I’m awf’ly glad to have it, part-ways ’cause it was fun goin’ where it is, and part-ways ’cause it’s so tall. I like things as goes far up! ” Therefore I very shortly sent him prints, respectively, of Giotto’s Campanile and of the Leaning Tower. The inclination thus kindled, the boy began to amass tall pictures, — of other towers, and of churches with spires, and of columns, and of obelisks. Recently I encountered him on the street. “How lucky to meet you! ” was his greeting. “I’ve jest got a new goin’-up-far picture! I tore it out of an old magazine I bought for two cents! ” He held it before me. It was a reproduction of a sketch of the Flat-Iron Building.

“But,” I demurred, “it is different from your others! ”

“Dif’rent! ” he reiterated. “Course it ain’t a church, or a tower, or anything o’ those kinds, same as my others; but it’s high, same as them! ”

Only a short time ago a girl who had seen on a coin-pin that I was wearing an enameled representation of St. George, advised me, after listening to the legend of that “most Christian knight,” to collect “pictures of people who slew dragons.” By way of practical encouragement she followed up her counsel by sending me a penny print of Guido Reni’s St. Michael.

Another, an older woman, collects Madonnas,— chiefly as they appear in penny prints and on souvenir postal cards. She has three by Botticelli, and five by Raphael, and two by Murillo; and she has Bodenhausen’s, and Holbein’s, and Dagnan-Bouveret’s, and many another. The last time I saw her she told me that she had a new one, which she had brought to show me. It was a photograph of Michael Angelo’s Pietà.

Most of us number among our acquaintances at least one individual who, impelled by a real or fancied resemblance to the personage of some famous picture, has been photographed, or has had a child photographed, attired in the costume, and posturing after the manner, of that personage. In the tenements an identical impulse occasionally manifests itself. I once attracted a somewhat dense crowd of small boys and girls, by essaying, as she posed uncertainly on the steps of the settlement house, the photograph of a girl, as Queen Louise of Prussia. The picture was a familiar one in the neighborhood. To very nearly every person there it was known as the trademark of a particular brand of shoe. The girl had frequently been informed that she was strikingly like it, — as, in fact, she was. Finally, after having for a week devoted her spare hours to contriving the comparatively simple royal habiliments, she requested me to take her picture, in character.

A young mother, when, one warm July day, I arrived by appointment to photograph her two-year-old baby, put on the head of the child, whose customary summer headgear was a sunbonnet, a close cap she had just completed; and arranged in his restless little hands a battered tennis ball. “He’s allus ’peared to me to favor in looks that Stuart baby in the settlement house sittin’ room,” she said gravely; “so I want him took like that.”

Only the other day a little girl of twelve, to whom I had given several prints of Madame La Brun’s pictures, petitioned the loan of my muff. “ I showed my school teacher the pictures you gave me,” she explained; “and a lady where my mother works, she’s got a camera, and she said she’d take me, fixed up like one of the pictures my teacher said I had a look of! ”

A young boy whom I knew detected a likeness, not between himself and the central figure of a picture, but between one pictured hero and another. He had seen, and been deeply impressed by, my treasured copy of Dürer’s Knight, Death and Devil. “A brave man, a knight he did need to be, in old days,” were his meditative words; “death being at hiss side; and a good man, the devil being at hiss back, — both so near! ”

“Yes,” I agreed.

The boy continued to gaze at the picture; but he said nothing more about it, and neither did I. Several months passed; and, though I saw the boy a number of times, he made no further mention of the picture, which, when I had shown it to him, I had said was a favorite of mine. I supposed he had forgotten it; but I found that I was mistaken.

He was painfully, though not seriously, hurt in a railway accident. Calling to see him, I noticed on the wall over his narrow cot a picture of Galahad the Deliverer, cut from a catalogue of the Copley Prints, which a friend of mine had, as I recollected, given to him.

“A knight haf I also,” he said shyly, indicating the picture of the “haut prince,” mounted upon his horse, his face set toward “a city that hight Sarras.” The boy continued: “In the Library, I see first hiss picture. Like your knight, he doess ride; like yours, he hass a brave face, and a good. Death, I see it not near him, nor the devil. But, not being seen, near are they.”

“They are never quite so far away as we would wish.” I said, as he paused for a response.

“No,” the boy went on earnestly; “they are not! This knight, ass yours, they follow. Like yours iss this picture. I keep it in my room to see often, that I not forget for me, ass for all, in and out of pictures, it iss that we need to be brave and good.”

A girl, one of my dearest friends in the tenement, discerned rather a more subtle bond of similarity uniting, at least for her, two pictures. She had seen, and much admired, Bastien-Lepage’s Jeanne d’Arc. I gave her a print of the picture; and, in reply to her query relative to the Maid of Orleans, lent her Mr. Lowell’s history of Joan of Arc, which she read with enthusiasm.

One evening she brought to the settlement what she described as a ConfessionBook; in which she soberly asked me to record my “true opinions.” These opinions, as a cursory examination of the book revealed, were to take the form of answers, written in blank spaces provided for them, of such questions printed opposite as, “ What is your favorite feminine name ?” and “Who is your favorite poet?” and “Which is your favorite flower ?”

Among the baits to catch “true opinions” was the inquiry, “Who are your favorite heroes in history ? ” The verb being plural, I filled in the blank space with several names. One was that of Savonarola. The owner of the ConfessionBook instantly solicited an account of this hero, unknown to her. “I’d like to hear more about him,” she exclaimed, when I had replied to her inquiries as fully as I might in the few moments at my immediate disposal.

Romola chanced to be in the house. I lent it to the girl. “ This will tell you more,” I said.

She read the novel with the most vivid interest. “Oh, if only I might have seen Savonarola! ” was her exclamation. “How wonderful he was! ”

My copy of Fra Bartolommeo’s portrait of the monk so appealed to her that she searched the picture shops until she found another copy, which she bought. She pointed it out to me when next I called. It was beside the picture of Jeanne d’Arc.

“I put them together,” she told me, “because they were alike.”

“Alike!” I echoed.

“Why, yes,” she rejoined; “don’t you think so? They both saw visions, and heard voices speaking to them, and bidding them save their nations! And they both tried to do it; and both were burned at the stake, because of trying! ”

It must be admitted that sometimes a book, coming between a picture and a spectator, totally eclipsed the picture. A young woman who, seeing a photograph of the Satyr of Praxiteles, had been incited by it to read The Marble Faun received without great avidity my suggestion that she seek out the cast of the statue in the Museum of Fine Arts. “ It did n’t have as much to do with the people in the story as some other things!” she said, in extenuation of her indifference.

Nevertheless, one Sunday afternoon,— Sunday being her only free day, — she accompanied me to the Museum. Leaving her with the sculptures, I went up stairs, to look at the Botticelli Madonna. But I did not get so far; for, in an adjoining room, I saw, standing before the Slave Ship, a little girl whose mother, lately dead, had been a dear friend. Her father was with her. Recognizing me, they pointed to the painting, and simultaneously cried, “Ain’t it queer !”

“What’s the sense of a picture like that ? ” the man asked.

Not being quite bold enough to venture upon an answer, I lent him a volume of Ruskin. Somewhat to my amazement, he not only read it, but asked for “more books, if any, written by the same man.”

He was a stone mason. So far as I was aware, he previously had read little outside of newspapers and the reports of trades-unions. “Does the Slave Ship interest you more, after reading what Ruskin says about the painter of it ? ” I inquired one evening, when he came to borrow a fifth volume of Ruskin’s works. “No,” he answered bluntly; “nothing could make me take interest in a picture that’s so mixed up. I like things plain. It ain’t for what he writes ’bout pictures I wants to read Buskin; it’s for what he writes ’bout work an’ pay. He makes it plainer ’n the paintin’ man he cracks up makes pictures,” he added with a laugh.

To a girl who asked of me other tribute to the Medusa than that of Pater, I had, of course, given Shelley’s poem. An older girl, whose imagination was stirred by Mr. Elihu Vedder’s Cup of Death, received, perforce, the Rubáiyát; and a woman to whom the Blessed Damozel had appealed could not be denied an introduction to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the rôle of a poet. But it has been my not infrequent experience among the people of tenement districts that, when a picture possesses no verbal prototype or reflection, they are apt to bestow one upon it.

One day, meeting in a trolley-car a boy, a former member of one of my clubs at the settlement, I removed the wrappings from a Japanese print which I had just purchased, in order that he might see my new acquisition. The picture was merely a study of deep brown shadows and thin gray lights. A tangle of grasses lay dark against a misty lake; here and there, from the narrow leaves, and out of the black sky, fireflies shone with a faint yellow brightness.

“I know why you got it,” the boy informed me; “’t was on ’count of its being in Hamlet ” —

“Hamlet!” I interposed.

“ Yes,” said my companion ; “ I remember where in it, too! ” And, with triumphant pride, he quoted: —

An older boy with whom I had acquaintance descried, no less obviously, in some verses upon which he chanced, what he announced to me as “ the words to Millet’s Sower,” a photograph of which I once sent him, in consequence of the pleasure he had taken in a little plaster bas-relief of it that he had seen at the settlement. I had lent him, in order that lie might memorize “ The Wonderful OneHoss Shay,” for declamatory purposes, a worn and much penciled volume of the Songs of Three Centuries, compiled by Whittier, When he came bringing the book, to make trial of his memory and his elocutionary power, in connection with the Deacon’s Masterpiece, he said to me almost reproachfully “You did n’t tell me the poem for my picture was there, in the book, too ! ”

“ What poem ? ” I queried. “ I don’t recall one,” I added apologetically.

“It’s marked, with a ribbon,” the boy observed; “but,” he conceded generously, “ I suppose you can’t remember everything.”

Opening the book, he read aloud, with genuine feeling, Mr. Gilder’s lines: —

One of my friends, to whom I narrated this occurrence, was inclined to be doubtful of the satisfaction such an alliance between the painting and the poem might furnish either the painter or the poet. “They were never intended to be joined together!” he irrevocably affirmed.

I repeated the remark to the boy of the tenements. “That makes no difference,” he maintained, “if they belong together; and not hard is it to see they do!”

Easy it assuredly had been for him. Did not Emerson once say that half of what any of us at all see in a picture, only ourselves have put into it ?