278 A Walk from 



while, for he was blind. He was poor ; often cold and 

 hungry, and his children, with blue fingers and pale, 

 silent eyes, sometimes asked for bread in winter he 

 could not give. He lived in a low cottage, small, 

 damp and dark, and laid him down at night upon a 

 bed of straw. He could not read; and his thoughts 

 of human life and its hereafter were few and small. 

 He had no taste for music, and seldom whistled at his 

 work. He wore a coarse garment, of ghostly pattern, 

 called a smock-frock. His hat just rounded his head 

 to a more globular and mindless form. His shoes were 

 as heavy as a horse's with iron nails. He had no eye 

 nor taste for colors. If all the trees, if all the crops of 

 grain, grass and roots on which he wrought his life 

 long, had come out in brickdust and oil, it would have 

 been all the same to him, if they had sold as high in 

 the market, and beer and bread had been as cheap for 

 the uniformity. And yet he was the Turner of this 

 great painting. He is the artist that has made Eng- 

 land a gallery of the finest agricultural pictures in the 

 world. And in no country in Christendom is High 

 Art so appreciated to such pecuniary patronage and 

 valuation as here. In none is the genius of the Pencil 

 so treasured, so paid, and almost worshipped as here. 

 The public and private galleries of Britain hold pic- 

 tures that would buy every acre of the island at the 



